Hera will soon head to the asteroid Dimorphos with CubeSats
ESA/Science Directorate
The European Space Agency (ESA) is sending a mission to find out what happened to an asteroid that NASA collided with in 2022. The Hera mission, scheduled to launch in October, will head to the asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA collided with during the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Mission.
The purpose of DART was to see if crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid would be a good way to protect Earth if one were to come our way.we know the impact Change the trajectory of Dimorphos The collisions around parent asteroid Didymos shorten each orbit by about 33 minutes, but details are not known about exactly how the collisions affected the asteroid or what happened next. do not have.
“To determine whether the impact left a crater or completely changed the shape of the asteroid, another spacecraft will need to return to the crime scene, because with the current data, either scenario is possible. That's why,” says Hera Mission Director. patrick michel At the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France. “Hera is a detective who will thoroughly investigate the effects.”
The mission consists of a main spacecraft that will fly up to 1 kilometer to Dimorphos, and two smaller cube-shaped satellites that are intended to land on the surface and see it up close. This research will not only be crucial for simulating potentially dangerous asteroids and how to deflect them in the future, but will also provide important scientific insights.
“Collisions have played an important role in the entire history of the solar system. We started the growth of planets through collisions, and all solid surfaces are full of impact craters,” Michel says. “If we're going to build a complete model of the solar system's collision history, we need to understand how these collisions work.” And it helps clarify how those conflicts work for us.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
