European Space Agency embarks on a mission to investigate asteroid redirected by NASA
Image Credit: Instagram/@europeanspaceagency NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART mission, achieved a significant feat by demonstrating a method of asteroid deflection. This was accompli...
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The NASA DART mission, which successfully deflected an asteroid by impacting it in space, is now being followed up by the European Space Agency's Hera mission. Scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on October 7, the Hera spacecraft will travel for four years before reaching the asteroid Didymos in October 2026. This mission aims to study the effects of the DART probe's impact on the asteroid and its moonlet, Dimorphos. The collaboration of various telescopes and satellites has provided valuable data on the impact and the resultant changes in the asteroid's trajectory. Through this collaborative effort, scientists hope to gain insights that will benefit the scientific community and space agencies in understanding asteroid deflection techniques.The goal is to achieve results and enhance models for successfully diverting asteroids from collision courses with Earth or space structures. Moreover, the Hera mission is poised to thoroughly investigate a binary asteroid system. This groundbreaking mission marks the first focused effort to analyze asteroid binaries like the Didymos and Dimorphos pair. With binaries accounting for 15% of all known asteroids, this exploration will provide valuable insights into the characteristics and actions of asteroids.