Image courtesy of ESA/Science Officeh
Joel Kontinen
NASA’s DART
mission slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, and the European Space
Agency (ESA) is sending the Hera mission to investigate the collision’s
aftermath.
The goal of DART
was to check whether smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid would be a good way
to defend Earth should an asteroid ever be heading in our direction. We know
that the impact shifted Dimorphos’ trajectory around its parent
asteroid, Didymos, shortening each orbit by about 33 minutes, but we don’t have
details on how exactly that collision affected the asteroid or what happened
afterwards.”
“We need another
spacecraft to go back to the crime scene in order to tell whether the impact
left a crater or entirely reshaped the asteroid, because with the current data
both scenarios are possible,” says Hera mission head Patrick Michel at
the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France. “Hera is a detective that
is going to do a complete investigation of the impact.”
Source:
Leah Crane 2024. In 2024 the Hera mission will revisit the asteroid punched by NASA | New Scientist 2 January.
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