This Monday, October 7, at 4:45 p.m. (Belgian time), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, United States. On board, the European space probe Hera. Its mission: to collect data from the asteroid Dimorphos to be able to reproduce the deviation of such a celestial object that would threaten to hit the Earth.
In 2022, the American space agency, NASA, achieved the feat of deflecting this 150 meter diameter asteroid while it was 11 million kilometers from our planet.
But the story does not end there since the European space agency, ESA, set up the Hera mission to carry out a careful examination of the asteroid after impact.
“Because, for this technique to be mastered and reproducible, with much larger asteroids, we must understand what caused this impact.”
UCLouvain announces that the research of its researchers “contributed greatly to the realization of this historic planetary defense mission. They made it possible to best prepare the mission, in particular thanks to the calculations of the trajectories of Hera towards the asteroid and its placement into orbit around Dimorphos or even thanks to the calculations trajectory of the Juventas nanosatellite, as large as a shoebox, which will detach from the Hera probe to land on Dimorphos This small satellite is equipped with a gravimeter, a sort of scale which will allow it to be “weighed”. asteroid very finely. Its prototype was developed at UCLouvain.”
University researchers will also analyze the data collected during the mission.
It will take two years for the probe to reach Dimorphos, which will then be more than 200 million kilometers from Earth.
