ESA – Spain: Hera, Europe’s first planetary defense mission, successfully launched | Science

European Space Defense Mission Hera He successfully launched from Cape Canaveral this Monday at 10:52 (16:52 Spanish time) on board the Falcon9 rocket of the private company SpaceX. Few believed that the launch would correspond to the planned program: the approach of the hurricane to the Florida coast. Milton “Which reached a maximum Category 5 around midday and is expected to make landfall this Wednesday in the western part of the state in the southern United States,” has cast serious doubt on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) plans. In the end, seemingly against all (meteorological) predictions, lightning struck the project’s scientists and engineers, who had spent the previous hours biting their nails and bracing for disappointment.

The roar of the engines, deafening from an observation point four kilometers away, and the clear wake of the rocket served as a statement of a historic moment for European space exploration and the beginning of the journey Heraa journey scheduled to be completed in October 2026. That’s when the ship will be 185,000 kilometers from Earth, along with the asteroid Dimorphos, to study the effects of a deliberate NASA rocket strike. DART

in September 2022.

Together, DART And Heraare part of a collaboration project between the US and European space defense agencies called AIDA (Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment). It’s about figuring out how to change the orbit of a rocky body so that we have resources when the unlikely moment comes when humanity needs to do so to avoid a fatal collision of an asteroid with its surface. 66 million years ago, an event of this kind led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The day turned out to be rainy, but by morning it cleared up, and the chances of a successful launch increased, SpaceX, a company owned by Elon Musk, calculated. About twenty minutes before the ejection, this percentage had already reached 70%, and the black clouds hanging over the SLC40 launch pad parted, leaving a ring of clear skies above. Hera. Then, when Falcon9 took off into deep space at the appointed time (it was its last flight after 22 round trips), 30 seconds was all it took for the plane to rise gracefully and disappear into the clouds. In the afternoon, Falcon9 completed its work, releasing the 1.1-ton probe on board.

The goal of this successfully launched trip is to analyze what happened after the mission’s kinetic impact. DART, NASA ship against Dimorphos, a small rocky body with a diameter of 150 meters and size similar to the Pyramid of Giza, capable of destroying a country or causing a huge tsunami if it hits Earth. Did the collision form a crater on its surface or change the shape of the asteroid? Samples collected Hera

and for the two small satellites that he carries with him (cubesatas engineers call them because of their rectangular parallelepiped shape, similar to a shoebox) will serve to solve puzzles related to the mass, structure, composition, thermal characteristics or gravitational behavior of the broken asteroid.

Two years of travel, six months of study

To do this, the mission will study the cosmic body for about six months, which will begin, if everything goes wrong, in October 2026. For this purpose the main ship and two cubesatwhich will be released upon arrival at their destination, are equipped with infrared thermal imaging and framing cameras, as well as spectrometers or a laser altimeter that will allow scientists to create a topographic map. One of cubesat It also has low frequency radar. The other includes a hyperspectral camera.

Dimorphos is part of a binary system of rock bodies; This is a small moon orbiting the main asteroid Didim, with a diameter of 780 meters. The DART impact, which impacted its target at 6 kilometers per second, took it out of orbit for 32 minutes. These days, European scientists who are in Cape Canaveral to participate in the launch of a four-year, 363 million euro project involving 18 countries have resorted to criminological comparisons to define the mission Hera

named after the Greek Goddess of Marriage: According to this comparison, it would be a detective who goes to a crime scene to try to understand what happened and draw conclusions to replicate this new military defense tactic in the future.

A delayed launch would certainly be problematic. It was announced that conditions would be somewhat better on Tuesday, but the arrival Miltonalong with the forecast for the launch of the next NASA mission, hair clipperpredicted the transfer of days. ESA had an orbital window for Herawhich opened this Monday and will close on October 27th. After that, we will have to wait until 2025 or 2026 to resume the mission.

Watching the newly launched rocket disappear into the clouds this Monday, an ESA employee still couldn’t believe the launch had taken place. “Between two hurricanes!” – he exclaimed, referring to the one that was approaching now. Helen, deadliest in US history since then Katrina, it passed through Florida a couple of weeks ago and left a trail of destruction that hit North Carolina particularly hard.