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Hera mission
December 9 , 2019
1687 days
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- The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the budget of Hera, the European component of the mission to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid.
- Due to launch in 2024, Hera would travel to a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair of near-Earth asteroids.
About Hera Mission & DART
- It is the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid.
- The mission will launch to asteroid 65803 Didymos, a binary pair made up of one large body and a smaller object that orbits around it, in 2023. Aptly nicknamed Didymoon.
- However, Hera mission won’t be the first to reach Didymos.
- NASA plans to launch the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) between 2020 and 2021, which will target Didymoon as part of its planetary defence programme.
- DART is a planetary defense-driven test of one of the technologies for preventing the Earth impact of a hazardous asteroid: the kinetic impactor.
- DART’s primary objective is to demonstrate a kinetic impact on a small asteroid.
- DART and Hera are conceived together as part of the international ‘Asteroid Impact Deflection Assessment’ experiment.
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