Hera is Europe’s contribution to an international experiment aimed at protecting the Earth against asteroid impacts. It will head towards Dimorphos, an asteroid struck and deflected two years ago by NASA’s Dart probe, to study its structure.
At the end of September 2022, the small American vessel deliberately crashed into this asteroid, approximately 160 meters in diameter and located 11 million kilometers from Earth. If Dimorphos poses no danger to the Blue Planet, the international experiment allows space agencies to practice deflecting a celestial body that threatens to hit the Earth.
“So that this technique can be mastered and reproducible with much larger asteroids, we must understand what exactly this impact caused,” explains UCLouvain.
In addition to calculating the trajectories of Hera towards the asteroid, the team from the Belgian university studied that of the Juventas nanosatellite. No bigger than a shoebox, the device will detach from the Hera probe to land on Dimorphos. The machine will be equipped with a gravimeter, the prototype of which was developed at UCLouvain. “This kind of scale will make it possible to ‘weigh’ the asteroid very finely,” explains the institution.
Once Hera has reached its destination, Belgian scientists will focus on collecting and analyzing data on the internal structure of Dimorphos.
The launch of Hera is scheduled for Monday at Cape Canaveral (United States). It will take the mission two years to reach Dimorphos. The first signals from the mission after takeoff are, however, expected by the ESA operational center and UCLouvain scientists on site in Florida around 6:15 p.m. (Belgian time).
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