Diego Escorial, a Spaniard who will prevent an asteroid from colliding with Earth on the command of the Hera mission.

More than 7,500 kilometers away, at the European Space Agency’s Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, Diego Escorial Olmos held his breath with his ESA colleagues. This 50-year-old from Madrid, who now looks like a 21st century Valle Inclan, Since 2020, he has dedicated himself body and soul to Hera as a systems engineer..

“I am the person who coordinates the technical part of all the various subsystemsboth in the design phase and in the testing and integration phase of the mission,” he says as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world during a video conference with EL ESPAÑOL – Omicrono.

A video of the launch shared by the space agency shows Hera’s breathtaking takeoff and undocking from the rocket’s second stage, as well as the overwhelming emotions of the team responsible for the missionincluding the Escorial itself. “It was very interesting,” he explains, his heart rate lower but keenly aware that everything is going well.

“We worked tirelessly on Hero for four years. We’ve done all the testing and preparation needed to launch on the 7th, and getting here hasn’t been easy. We knew we were launching during hurricane season, so it was an unknown, a big one. You watch the news and see that the hurricane continues to grow, you get very nervous.. But nevertheless, on Monday morning we were all optimistic that it would be launched… and in the end it was launched.”

From Don Quixote to Hera

Hera’s launch is a key step in Project AIDA (Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment), a collaboration between NASA and ESA to test the effectiveness of a planetary defense formula consisting of crash a spaceship into the heart of a potentially dangerous asteroid. DART was responsible for the first part of the mission on November 26, 2022, when the vehicle successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos.

Hera is now traveling to the same place, 11 million kilometers from our planet, to study the composition of the asteroid and check the consequences of the impact. “To do this, we had to develop some very interesting technologies that will allow us to go there and investigate in detail what happened. Although this is not new, it happened a long time ago…” explains Escorial.

Brief description of Hera’s mission

It all started more than two decades ago when A completely European mission was first proposed by Cervantine under the name of Don Quixote.. Instead of giant windmills, the ships Hidalgo and Sancho would have collided with potential meteorites. “We were going to take care of both the ship that was supposed to collide with the asteroid and the orbital probe that was supposed to study the collision. But we did not receive the money, and the mission disappeared. Then in 2014 it was revived in collaboration with NASA, and that’s how we got here,” the aerospace engineer recalls without a hint of nostalgia, although he was also part of this team along with other Spaniards.

Is playing this type of space billiards the best way to protect our planet from the possible impact of asteroids? “It depends on several factors. Firstly, you need to know which asteroid is approaching and its characteristicstherefore, a ship like the Hera is needed as an observer. “The method we are using and testing is kinetic forcing, which is most suitable for certain asteroids, not all.”

In the case of larger stellar objects, things get more complicated.. “This is pure physics. If it’s very big, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, what you’d need to send to crash into it would have to be huge too, and we can’t launch a 300,000 ton device today. “For small asteroids like Dimorphos (160 meters in diameter), which can still locally cause quite a lot of damage, this method is ideal.”

The most important part of planetary defense, Escorial recalls, “is when you detect an asteroid. If you take it 20 years into the future, provided you move it forward a little, Over time it will disintegrate and eventually deviate quite a bit.. If you discover this three months before arrival, it will be much more difficult and you will have to strike very hard.”

In fact, recent scientific research confirms using nuclear devices to deflect asteroids as the only viable option when the reaction time is short or when its size is much more threatening than that of Dimorphos. “Launching a nuclear bomb on a rocket, as you can imagine, has its risks, and many people will say that it may not be a good idea. I wouldn’t rule it out completely either, because I haven’t studied it in detail, but our method is much safer if the collision path is detected in advance.

To Mars and beyond

From time to time in Escorial he has difficulty finding the exact word in Spanish. ESA’s working language is English, and its team includes people from many countries, “from Finland to Spain.” For him, in this “healthy and interesting” multicultural environment, there is only one problem: “getting used to eating at 12 am,” he says with a slight smile.

Immediately after this conversation, Hera’s systems engineer is scheduled to begin his shift monitoring the satellite just as LEO (low Earth orbit) ends, which is equivalent to the first three days of the mission’s life. “At the moment we have deployed the solar panels, pointed them at the Sun, pointed them at the Earth and are using inertia wheels. We are all very happy because the mission is difficult. This is not an easy task. satellite, it was necessary to develop and so far everything is working as expected“.

Just a few days ago and two periods during which he worked at ESA —from 2002 to 2009 and from 2016 to present— Escorial developed most of his work at the European Space Research and Technology Center in Noordwijk (Netherlands).

It was here that all the necessary tests were carried out to prepare Hera and her nanosatellites Juventas and Milani for withstand the extreme conditions of space and a journey of 11 million kilometers“The further you move from Earth, the more communication capabilities you need to have. And the further away from the sun you get, the colder the satellite gets, so you have to heat it up, and the less energy you generate with your solar panels,” explains Escorial. “That’s why you have to design your satellite with these situations in mind and give it the appropriate autonomy.”

In addition to design (a task that was completed in 2022), ESA engineers under Escorial were responsible for integration, “something like twist everything together and connect them“Finally, the spacecraft was put through an extensive testing phase to “demonstrate here on earth that the satellite will be able to do everything you want it to do under the conditions it will have from launch.”

“We are standing on top of a bomb and it will vibrate a lot, so we need to prove that it will withstand this phase. Then in orbit it will be exposed to various thermal and electromagnetic conditions.… So we put the satellite in such conditions to show that everything will work as we believe,” he says.

Despite the intensive testing carried out at ESTEC, problems or failures may occur during measurements, the accuracy of which is key. “The software part is what gives us some flexibility,” as evidenced by the longevity of Voyager 2, which continues to receive updates 47 years after launch. “If the device communicates late with the computer, We can always implement a program to adapt and resolve the situation.. Just in case, we also introduced redundancy on the satellite so that if there is a failure, there is a backup to continue operations.”

If all goes wrong, Hera is predicted to reach its destination in the fall of 2026, where it will spend 6 months studying celestial bodies. However, the first scientific data of interest will be sent to Earth in mid-March 2025, when It is expected that ESA will be able to calibrate the probe’s instruments during its flyby to Mars. where, in addition to using its gravitational field to propel itself, it will receive images of the planet and its moon Deimos.

For this purpose, systems designed and developed by Spanish companies, of which Escorial is proud, will be fundamental. “Spain’s contribution to Gera was very important. We had GMV doing GNC (guidance, control and navigation), Thales Alenia Spain in charge of telecommunications, and Sener providing the low gain antenna,” to which we can add the participation of Alter and EMCSIS. “Actually, The CNG subsystem is one of the most important in the mission.as Hera should be able to autonomously target the asteroid.”

When there are a few minutes left before the end of the interview, Escorial says: “Sorry, I’ll have to leave you, they need me.” This is the job of one of the people responsible for monitoring this mission worth 363 million euros which will be the key to protecting the Earth from the effects of asteroids, will successfully complete its long odyssey into the depths of the solar system.