A European spacecraft soared away from the coast of Florida on Monday, the start of a journey to visit an asteroid that an earlier NASA mission deliberately crashed into in 2022.
Hera, a car-size orbiter built by the European Space Agency, is the latest mission in a global effort to build a strategy for defending our planet from hazardous space rocks.
Here’s what to know about the Hera mission and its launch.
The Hera mission launched on time.
Hera launched at Oct. 7 at 10:52 a.m. Eastern time from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, overcoming earlier concerns that poor weather conditions might postpone the flight. The spacecraft will travel attached to the SpaceX rocket’s upper stage for about 75 minutes before it separates and beings its journey into deep space.
ESA is streaming a live broadcast of the event on YouTube, which you can watch in the video player above.
Where is Hera going?
Hera is headed to an asteroid named Dimorphos, a 495-foot-wide object orbiting an even bigger rock named Didymos. About two years ago, NASA demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to alter the path of an asteroid with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART. The mission’s primary spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos at more than 14,000 miles per hour, sending a dusty cloud of debris and boulders thousands of miles into space.
Hera is going back to the scene to determine what the properties of Dimorphos are, how efficient the DART mission was and how to make deflecting killer asteroids a regular tool in humanity’s planetary defense arsenal.
Hera is expected to reach Didymos and Dimorphos by October 2026, at which point the spacecraft will be 121 million miles from Earth.
What will Hera do when it reaches its destination?
A primary goal of the mission is to learn what exactly DART did to Dimorphos. Did it leave a small crater, or was the asteroid completely reshaped, as one study suggests?
While circling the two asteroids, Hera will spend up to six months gathering data about Dimorphos with optical cameras, a spectrometer to probe the composition of the asteroid and a thermal imager to measure its surface temperature.
Hera’s high-gain antenna will transmit this data back to Earth; small shifts in the frequency of these signals, caused by Dimorphos’s gravity, will aid scientists in determining the asteroid’s shape and mass.
The mission will also deploy two mini satellites, or CubeSats. One, Juventas, will use radar sounding to probe the interior of Dimorphos. A second, Milani, will image the asteroids and survey the dust surrounding the pair.
The measurements Hera takes will also lend insight into how binary asteroid systems form and what their environment is like.
How else is humanity planning to avoid destruction from space?
Sky trackers around the world have spotted nearly all near-Earth objects wider than about than about 0.6 miles in diameter, which are big enough to cause a global extinction event like the one that killed the dinosaurs. But only about a third of smaller bodies near Earth like Dimorphos — which can cause considerable damage to the planet on their own — have been discovered so far.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, set to turn on next year, will help scientists complete that task, as will the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, a NASA space telescope planned to launch in 2027.
Planetary defenders are also scrambling to build other spacecraft for more asteroid encounters. Ramses, a mission led by the European Space Agency, could visit Apophis, an asteroid that will come less than 20,000 miles from Earth’s surface in 2029. China’s space program is also planning a DART-like mission that could launch this decade.
A decade from now, scientists hope that the asteroid target practice, a comprehensive inventory of nearby space rocks and the ability for quick and early reconnaissance will converge into a well-rounded fortress for our cosmic home.
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