A spacecraft is currently en route to an asteroid that NASA successfully knocked off course in 2022. The Hera mission, led by the European Space Agency (ESA), launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 10:52 local time (15:52 BST) on Monday. This mission is part of an international effort to explore ways to prevent potentially dangerous asteroids from colliding with Earth.
The spacecraft is headed toward Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos, located approximately seven million miles from Earth. NASA previously altered the course of Dimorphos by crashing a probe into it as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in 2022. The goal was to test whether space agencies could redirect an asteroid’s path in case of a future threat to Earth.
If all goes according to plan, Hera will reach Dimorphos in December 2026. Upon arrival, it will study the impact crater created by NASA’s DART mission and analyze the asteroid’s composition. Two cube-shaped probes will also gather data on Dimorphos’s mass and structure to help scientists understand its properties.
While scientists believe there is currently no threat of a large asteroid causing a catastrophic event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, they hope that missions like Hera will provide insights on how to minimize the damage from smaller, harder-to-detect asteroids. These asteroids, ranging from 100 to 200 meters wide, occasionally collide with Earth, as seen in the 2013 incident in Chelyabinsk, Russia.
The research conducted by Hera will aid in developing strategies to deflect potentially hazardous asteroids in the future. However, experts caution that while NASA has demonstrated success with DART, the same techniques may not be effective on all space rocks, and spotting incoming asteroids early remains a critical factor in planetary defense.
