Hera must leave Earth this Monday to head for the asteroid Dimorphos. Its mission: to check whether the impact caused by a previous probe in 2022 made it possible to modify the orbit of the celestial body.
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Deputy Head of the Planet Division
Par Michel De MuelenaerePublished on 6/10/2024 at 5:45 p.m.
Reading time: 2 min
DIn the jargon, specialists call this a “planetary defense mission”. A little flavor of science fiction, but the reality is a little less glamorous. We remember the Dart mission which, on September 26, 2022, struck the asteroid Dimorphos, very slightly modifying its orbit. As far as we know, this is the first time that an object in the solar system has seen its trajectory affected by human intervention. From the launch of Dart, an addition was planned in the form of a European mission – Hera – responsible for carrying out usage observations and a neighborhood survey after the collision.
It is this Monday at 4:52 p.m. that Hera is scheduled to take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher from Cape Canaveral, Florida. She will travel well beyond Mars to collect data about Dimorphos, to test whether “kinetic deflection” is a reliable planetary defense technique.
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