The European space defense mission Hera successfully took off from Cape Canaveral this Monday at 10:52 (16:52, Spanish peninsular time) aboard a rocket Falcon9 from the private company SpaceX. Very few were confident that the launch would comply with its planned program: the approach of a hurricane to the Florida coast, Miltonwhich acquired category 3 (out of a maximum of 5) during the early hours of the morning and is expected to make landfall this Wednesday in the western part of the state in the southern United States, put the plans of the European Space Agency (ESA) in serious doubt. In the end, it would almost seem that against all (meteorological) forecasts, the wind and lightning spared the project’s scientists and engineers, who had spent the last few hours biting their nails and preparing for disappointment.
The roar of the rocket engines and the screams of those present underlined a historic moment for European astronautics and the beginning of the voyage of Heraa trip that is scheduled to end in October 2026, when the ship will be 185,000 kilometers from Earth with the asteroid Dimorphos to study the consequences of the deliberate impact of the NASA rocket DART in September 2022. Together, DART and Heraare part of a project that investigates how to divert the orbit of a space body to have resources when the unlikely moment comes when humanity needs to do so to avoid the fatal collision of an asteroid against its surface. 66 million years ago, such an event ended the life of the dinosaurs.
The impact of DART It was historic, and the commission of Hera is to analyze what happened after the kinetic impact with that rocky body 150 meters in diameter and a size similar to that of the pyramid of Giza. Did a crater open on its surface or alter the shape of the asteroid? The samples collected by Hera and by the two small satellites (cubesatsengineers call them, due to their rectangular paralleliped shape similar to a shoebox) will serve to solve enigmas related to the mass, structure, composition, thermal characteristics or gravitational behavior of Dimorphos.
To do this, the mission will study the body for about six months that will begin, if nothing goes wrong, in October 2026. To do this, the main ship and the two cubesatswhich will be released upon reaching the binary system, have infrared thermal 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 has a low-frequency radar, and the other incorporates a hyperspectral camera.
Dimorphos is part of a binary system of rocky bodies; It is the small moon that orbits the main asteroid, Didymos, 780 meters in diameter. The hit by DART, which collided with its target at a speed of 6 kilometers per second, took it out of orbit for 32 minutes. These days, the European scientists who are at Cape Canaveral to attend the launch of a four-year project that has cost 363 million euros and has involved 18 countries, resorted to a criminological simile to define the mission of Hera, named after honoring the Greek goddess of marriage: according to this comparison, this would be the detective who goes to the crime scene to try to understand what happened and draw conclusions to replicate this novel military defense tactic in the future.
A delay in launch would certainly have been problematic. The conditions were announced to be somewhat better for this Tuesday, but the arrival of Miltontogether with the forecast of the launch of another NASA mission, clipperpredicted a delay of days. ESA had an orbital window to Herawhich opened this Monday and will close on October 27. After that, we would have to wait until 2025 or until 2026 to resume the mission.
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