European Space Mission Launches to Investigate an Asteroid Crash Site

The Hera spacecraft, which took flight late Monday morning, is part of a broader effort to bolster humanity’s planetary defense readiness.

In humanity’s latest bid to avoid going the way of the dinosaurs, a European spacecraft soared away from the coast of Florida on Monday. The mission, Hera, will visit an asteroid that NASA deliberately struck with another spacecraft two years ago.

The car-size orbiter launched from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:52 a.m. Eastern time against a backdrop of gray, cloudy skies. Led by the European Space Agency, Hera is the latest spacecraft to join a global effort to build a strategy for defending our planet from hazardous rocks in space.

Sci-fi aficionados have long imagined that the threat of an asteroid or comet hurtling toward our planet would be annihilated via nuclear explosion, as evidenced by films like “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” and, more recently, “Don’t Look Up.” But scientists have found that a more viable — though much less dramatic — plan for avoiding Earth’s destruction is simply to knock a looming rock out of the way, a method known as kinetic impact deflection.

In 2022, NASA demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to alter the path of an asteroid with a mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART. The target of the mission’s primary spacecraft was an asteroid named Dimorphos, a 495-foot-wide object orbiting an even bigger rock named Didymos. Neither body posed a threat to Earth, but the binary asteroid system was close enough to Earth for the impact to be studied by observatories on the ground.

DART slammed into Dimorphos at more than 14,000 miles per hour, its camera transmitting a final, partial image of the asteroid’s cobbled surface just before the impact. The strike sent a dusty cloud of debris and boulders thousands of miles into space. The collision shortened the asteroid’s orbit around its parent body by 33 minutes — well over the 73-second goal set by NASA.

“I see DART as being just the start,” said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and DART’s coordination lead. “A smashing start, one might even say.”