The “crazy project” of developing technology capable of diverting the trajectory of an asteroid that, say, comes directly at Earth, will take a big step for Humanity this Monday with the launch from the Cape Canaveral station – and if the unforeseeable Florida’s meteorology does not prevent it – from the Hera mission, of the European Space Agency (ESA). It will do so aboard a SpaceX Falcon9 rocket and when it reaches its destination in a couple of years, the probe will dedicate itself to studying the dent produced by the kinetic impact, on November 26, 2022, of the DART spacecraft. NASA, against an asteroid called Dimorphos, whose orbit it managed to alter for 32 minutes. That was a historic achievement that now has to be analyzed in depth.
The quotes for “crazy project” are from the Italian Ian Carnelli, director of Herawho was walking through the common areas of a hotel in Cocoa Beach this Sunday, kitsch resort town next to Cape Canaveral, with an understandable mix of excitement and nerves fueled by a last-minute uncertainty: a tropical storm, called Miltonformed over the weekend in the Gulf of Mexico and will make landfall, expected on Wednesday afternoon, on the West Coast of Florida as a category 3 hurricane (out of a maximum of 5). Bad weather forced the suspension of activities the day before the launch, which could be postponed due to a probability of success, certainly low late on Sunday, of 15%, according to SpaceX engineers.
So Carnelli no longer knew how to cross his fingers. “The takeoff of Hera It will be the end of a journey that began in 2004,” he said. “Although the craziest thing is that we have been able to mount a space mission in just four years, which have passed since we received the permits and funding. Normally, something like this takes between seven and 12 years and can cost up to 800 million euros.” The investment in the Hera project has amounted to 363 million. And things, of course, were in a hurry: this October 7, an orbital window opens to launch the spacecraft that will close on the 27th of this month. “If we don’t take advantage of it, we will have to send the satellite to a museum. When that period expires, it will no longer be possible to achieve Dimorphos,” explains Carnelli.
The mission was named after the goddess of marriage in a resource relevant to Greek mythology. Almost everything in this “crazy project” is double. There are two asteroids that were chosen for the experiment: Dimorphos is actually half of a binary system of rocky bodies, the small moon (about 150 meters in diameter, a size comparable to the pyramid of Giza) that orbits around to the main asteroid, Didymos, 780 meters. And there are also two ships sent to disrupt the couple’s placid space existence: the American DART (dart, in English, acronym for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and the European Heraunder a “planetary defense” agreement between both agencies named AIDAanother beautiful acronym (Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment).
The first pushed Dimorphos’ orbit upon impact at a speed of six kilometers per second. The second will behave, in the definition of the Frenchman Patrick Michel, Hera’s main scientist, like “a detective” who returned to the scene of the crime or, to use the criminological simile, as one of those experts from the series CSI to those they sent to understand what happened and draw conclusions.
This expert has many enigmas to solve – unknowns about the mass, structure, composition, thermal characteristics or gravitational behavior of Dimorphos – but above all one question to answer: did the impact of DART a crater or deformed the asteroid? The scientist Michael Küppers, a German resident in Spain, opts for the second option. “The preliminary results that the telescope images have given us make us think in that sense.” In some ways, that outcome would imply greater success for DART. “It would tell us that the impact was larger and that it was closer to destroying the body,” Küppers clarifies.
The launch of Hera It will be (if it is) possible thanks to an ESA contract with SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aeronautical company, in whose facilities in Cape Canaveral the Falcon9 rocket, which has successfully gone and returned to space, rests, ready for its last mission. on 22 occasions. The probe will travel with two small satellites that scientists call cubesatsThey are about the size of a shoebox and will get to work when Hera has approached the asteroid system.
The main ship travels equipped with, among other instruments listed by Franco Pérez Lissi, Spanish systems engineer at ESA, thermal infrared and framing cameras, as well as spectrometers or a laser altimeter that will allow scientists to draw a topographic map. One of the cubesats It also carries a low-frequency radar, which, Pérez Lissi adds, “will look inside an asteroid for the first time in history to distinguish its different layers.” The other incorporates a hyperspectral camera. They will reach their destination, a point lost in space 181 million kilometers from Earth, in October 2026, on a trip for which they will be able to count on the gravitational assistance of Mars. They will work at the crime scene for about six months. The work, Küppers estimates, could be ready by “some point in the second half of 2027.”
In the middle of the pandemic
That moment will mark the end of eight years of work in which 18 European countries have participated (Spain, for example, has contributed to the navigation technology part). Before, there was a previous attempt: a mission that did not receive ESA approval and was scheduled to launch in 2020, something that would have allowed the detective to witness the commission of the crime live. The Hera project finally obtained its permit in 2019 and got underway in the middle of the pandemic. This exceptional situation and the strangulation of supply chains that resulted from it did not exactly make the work of the scientists and engineers easy, who this Sunday gathered by the dozens, some with their families, at the Cocoa Beach hotel to listen to the latest conclusions of the project. The atmosphere was celebratory.
Carnelli was the most wanted man. His next project in space defense, Ramses, will consist of sending a copy of Hera to the asteroid Apophis (another Egyptian god, of chaos). “For years, we thought that there was a 100% chance that it would collide with the earth, but then, by studying it better, we lowered its destructive capacity, so to speak,” clarified the Italian scientist. The ideal time to analyze it will be in 2029, when the asteroid, measuring about 300 meters, approaches less than 32,000 kilometers from the Earth’s surface, below the orbits of telecommunications satellites.
Apophis’ spectacular entry onto the scene was in 2004, the year in which Carnelli began working on an ESA project that they named Don Quixote (spear at the ready against the windmills/asteroids). That company was already contemplating the plan to send two ships: the one for the impact and the one for studying its consequences (which would be Sancho, of course). It came to nothing. “Then they flirted with strange ideas like painting asteroids different colors, or sending nuclear bombs, nets to tow them… things like that. We never got the money for Don Quixote; It is difficult for politicians to invest in something whose results they will not see in their lifetime. ‘It’s not a priority,’ they said. They didn’t quite understand if it was technology, science or a military issue. They thought it was too futuristic.
At that time, space defense was a stuttering field of science, whose big Bang It is possible to place it in 1994, when Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 hit Jupiter, a planet in which it caused holes “as big as the Earth.” “There we realized that this was serious,” says Carnelli. Pop culture also contributed to the development of space defense, admits the director of the Hera project: “Films like Deep Impact either Armageddon [ambas de 1998] They pushed us to deal with an issue that we had neglected. All you have to do is look at the Moon, other planets or shooting stars every night: there are objects flying around us. Of course, the atmosphere protects the Earth quite a bit, but not enough for a serious event.”
Before running out to find shelter for the Apocalypse, you should know that Carnelli, who points to the 2013 explosion of a meteorite over a town in the Urals, Chelyabinsk, as “another wake-up call”, also warns that no impact is expected. worrying “for the next hundreds of years.” “We have large bodies under control. Not so much the small ones, because there are hundreds of thousands, millions. An asteroid the size of Dimorphos150 meters in diameter, could cause a tsunami if it fell into the ocean, or wipe out a country if it hit land,” says the scientist.
Küppers, for his part, warns that, although DART has proven humanity’s ability to deflect one of these space threats, for “the “Armageddon” we will have to wait. In the film, a blockbuster, a mission of astronauts who love Aerosmith and led by Ben Affleck manages to destroy a meteorite the size of Texas with the launch of a bomb, whose impact is 18 days away. What’s more: they manage to return home safely. “A last-minute deviation from these characteristics is not possible,” clarifies Küppers. “To achieve something like this would require either a lot of advance time or something larger than DART or, if not, several DARTs.” And that, for now, is pure science fiction.
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