After NASA deliberately smashes a car-sized spacecraft into an asteroid next week, it would be up to the European Space Agency’s Hera mission to investigate the “crime scene” and uncover the secrets of these potentially devastating space rocks.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) aims to collide with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Monday night, hoping to slightly alter its trajectory — the first time such an operation has been attempted.
While Dimorphos is 11 million kilometers away and poses no threat to Earth, the mission is a test run in case the world someday needs to deflect an asteroid from heading our way.
Astronomers around the world will watch DART’s impact, and its effect will be closely monitored.
Then, the Hera mission — named after the ancient Greek queen of the gods — is to follow in its footsteps. The Hera spacecraft is to launch in October 2024, aiming to arrive at Dimorphos in 2026 to measure the impact.
Scientists are not only excited to see DART’s crater, but also to explore an object that is very much out of this world.
Dimorphos, which orbits the larger asteroid Didymos as they hurtle through space, provides a “perfect testing opportunity for a planetary defence experiment,” Hera mission manager Ian Carnelli said.
Hera is to be loaded up with cameras, spectrometers, radars and even toaster-sized nano-satellites to measure the asteroid’s shape, mass, chemical composition and more. NASA associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy Bhavya Lal said that it was critically important to understand the size and composition of such asteroids.
“If an asteroid is made up of, for example, loose gravel, approaches to disrupt it may be different than if it was metal or some other kind of rock,” she told the International Astronautical Congress in Paris this week.
When a Japanese probe dropped an explosive near the surface of the Ryugu asteroid in 2019, it was expected to make a 3m crater, but blasted a 50m hole.
“There was no resistance,” Hera mission principal investigator Patrick Michel said. “The surface behaved almost like a fluid,” rather than solid rock.
Michel said DART’s findings would not only be important for Earth’s defense, but for understanding the history of our solar system, where most cosmic bodies were formed through collisions.
That is where DART and Hera could shine a light not just on the future, but on the past.
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