The DART mission, led by NASA, successfully demonstrated a method of deflecting asteroids by changing their motion in space through kinetic impact. In September 2022, the mission impacted asteroid Didymos and its moonlet Dimorphos, altering their trajectory. Two years later, the European Space Agency's Hera mission is launching to map the same asteroid. Hera is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral on October 7 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, traveling several hundred million kilometers to reach its destination by October 2026. The Hera spacecraft is about the size of a small car and weighs around 1,081 kilograms. The mission aims to study the impact of NASA's DART probe on Dimorphos and investigate its effect on the double asteroid.

Italian CubeSat images provided essential information about the asteroid's surface properties before the impact, while the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes documented the event. Ground-based telescopes confirmed DART's successful deflection of Dimorphos and observed a reduction in its orbital period around Didymos after impact. The impact left a trail thousands of kilometers long, possibly entering Earth's atmosphere in the future. Hera's main objective is to investigate the aftermath of the impact, contributing valuable insights for the scientific community and space agencies.The content can be rephrased as: "The aim is to achieve results and enhance models for successfully diverting asteroids from potentially colliding with Earth or space structures. Furthermore, the Hera mission anticipates conducting an in-depth study of a binary asteroid system, marking the first dedicated mission to investigate asteroid pairs like Didymos and Dimorphos. With 15% of known asteroids existing in binary form, this exploration will provide valuable insights to advance our understanding of asteroid characteristics and behaviors."