The Hera mission to Mars is launched. The safety of the Earth depends on it
The European Space Agency (ESA) recently launched a mission that will bring the Hera spacecraft close to Mars. The safety of the Earth depends on this endeavor.
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Scientists want to investigate whether we will protect the Earth
Hera is an ESA expedition that follows on from the 2022 DART mission, when NASA intentionally directed the spacecraft to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos. That mission was to check whether the ship could change the trajectory of a flying asteroid. This is exactly what happened and NASA achieved success. Thanks to this, we know that if such an object were approaching Earth, we could send a vehicle and hope that it would knock the asteroid off course.
However, the Hera mission is to go further and determine what exactly was the effect of the collision of the DART ship with the Dimorphos asteroid. It is known that the asteroid’s shape and trajectory have changed, but ESA wants to find out what the asteroid is made of and how exactly the collision affected it.
Hera is to approach Mars and then use the planet’s gravitational forces to push off towards Dimorphos, an asteroid located around a larger object of the same type called Didymos. The ship will reach there at the end of 2026 and will also explore Mars’ moon Deimos and fly less than 300 km from it.
The ESA spacecraft performed its first two maneuvers in space on October 23 and November 6, 2024, by turning on its maneuvering engines twice, and then on November 21, 2024, it will slightly adjust its trajectory to fly straight towards Mars.
In addition to the Deimos study, Hera will also make some measurements of Mars with the Emirati Hope mission and then provide data for Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission in 2026.
