Patrick Michel, Hera Principal Investigator at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), describes in this video his long professional relationship with asteroids. He explains that they can be simultaneously our enemies – a danger from time to time – and our friends – tellers of Solar System history. He considers Hera as a detective returning to the scene of a crime (the DART collision) to carry out an investigation to discover what happened and decipher the interior structure of these small bodies. Are they as our models predict?
Hera is ESA’s first planetary defence mission, heading to a unique target among the 1.3 million known asteroids of our Solar System. On 26 September 2022 NASA’s DART mission performed humankind’s first test of asteroid deflection by crashing into the Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos moonlet. The result was a shift in its orbit around the mountain-sized Didymos main asteroid.
Now comes ESA’s own contribution to this international collaboration: the Hera mission will revisit Dimorphos to gather vital close-up data about the deflected body.
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