The European Area Company (ESA) is sending a mission to analyze what occurred to an asteroid that NASA punched in 2022. The Hera mission, launching in October, will head to asteroid Dimorphos, which NASA hit with its Double Asteroid Redirection Check (DART) mission.

The objective of DART was to verify whether or not smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid could be a great way to defend Earth ought to an asteroid ever be heading in our course. We all know that the affect shifted Dimorphos’ trajectory round its guardian asteroid, Didymos, shortening every orbit by about 33 minutes, however we don’t have particulars on how precisely that collision affected the asteroid or what occurred afterwards.

“We want one other spacecraft to return to the crime scene in an effort to inform whether or not the affect left a crater or totally reshaped the asteroid, as a result of with the present knowledge each eventualities are potential,” says Hera mission head Patrick Michel on the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France. “Hera is a detective that’s going to do a whole investigation of the affect.”

The mission consists of 1 predominant spacecraft, which can fly as shut as 1 kilometre to Dimorphos, and two tiny cube-shaped satellites meant to land on its floor and test it out up shut. That investigation will likely be essential to simulations of probably harmful asteroids and deflect them sooner or later, however it is going to additionally present key scientific insights.

“Collisions play a key position in all of the photo voltaic system historical past – we began rising planets by collisions, all of the strong surfaces are populated with craters from collisions,” says Michel. “If we’re going to construct a whole mannequin of the collision historical past of the photo voltaic system, we have to perceive how these collisions work.” Hera will assist reveal how collisions work in area – and make these collisions work for us.