Asteroid-smash aftermath: Why Europe is sending a probe to DART-battered Dimorphos - Space.com
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Hera mission will arrive at the binary asteroid system Didymos more than four years after NASA's DART probe slammed into one of its two space rocks. .By that time, all the dust generated by the experimental collision will have settled, allowing Hera and its two companion cubesats to turn the Didymos duo into the best explored space rocks in the universe. .Hera, or its predecessor concept AIM (for Asteroid Impact Mission), was originally planned to reach Didymos ahead of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Sept.Fitted with a suite of elaborate cameras and sensors, Hera was meant to be the witness of the milestone experiment, which was designed to validate the "kinetic impact" technique that one day might save Earth from a devastating asteroid strike?
And these questions need to be answered for the kinetic impact technique to be fully validated in case it is ever needed to ward off an asteroid strike on Earth. .
"Hera will measure the mass of Dimorphos, which will give us a more accurate estimate of how efficient this technique was in deflecting the asteroid," Michael Kueppers, Hera project scientist at ESA, said in a news conference on Sept.Hundreds of ground-based telescopes are currently observing the Didymos system, with the goal of determining how much the DART impact altered the orbit of the 534-foot-wide (160 meters) Dimorphos around the 0.5-mile-wide (780 m) Didymos.LICIACube's official science mission ended after it performed a close flyby of Dimorphos in the first minutes after the DART impact!
To gather these details, Hera will carry a lidar ("light detection and ranging") sensor to map the surface of the two asteroids with great precision, a thermal camera for analyzing the chemical properties of the surface and an optical camera to enable scientists to view the final impact crater and the untouched Didymos.— NASA's DART asteroid impact won't make Dimorphos hit Earth — but here's what would happen if it did.Telescopes spot DART asteroid impact in deep space (videos) .