After The Asteroid Collision, Europe’s Hera Will Probe ‘Crime Scene’
After NASA deliberately crushes a car-sized spacecraft into an asteroid the following week, it´ll be up to European Space Agency’s Hera mission to investigate the “crime scene” and discover the secrets of these potentially devastating space rocks.
NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) aims to collide with the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos on Monday night, hoping to slightly alter its trajectory– the first time such a procedure has been attempted.
While Dimorphos is eleven million kilometers (6.8 million miles) away and poses no damage to Earth, the objective is a test run in case the world someday requires to deflect an asteroid from heading our way.
Astronomers around the world will watch DART’s effect, and its effect will be closely followed to see if the mission passed the test.
Then, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission, called after the ancient Greek queen of the gods, will follow in its footsteps.
The Hera spacecraft is planned to release in October 2024, intending to arrive at Dimorphos in 2026 to measure the exact effect DART had on the asteroid.
However, scientists are not just excited to observe DART’s crater but also to explore an object that is very much out of this globe.
The larger asteroid
Dimorphos, which orbits a more giant asteroid Didymos as they hurtle together through space, offers not only a “perfect testing possibility for a planetary defense experiment, but it is also a completely recent environment,” the ESA’s Hera mission manager Ian Carnelli stated.
Hera will be loaded up with cameras, spectrometers, radars, and also toaster-sized nano-satellites to measure the asteroid’s form, mass, chemical composition, and more.
NASA’s Bhavya Lal stated that it was critically essential to understand the dimension and also the composition of such asteroids.
“If an asteroid is made up of, for instance, loose crushed rock, approaches to disrupt it may be different than if it was steel or some other kind of rock,” she informed the International Astronautical Congress in Paris this week.
So little is known concern Dimorphos that scientists will discover “a current world” at the same time as the public on Monday, Hera objective principal investigator Patrick Michel said.
“Asteroids are not uninteresting space rocks– they are very exciting because they have a great diversity” in size, form, and composition, Michel said.
And because they have reduced gravity compared to Earth, matter there could behave entirely differently than expected.
” Unless you touch the surface area, you can not know the mechanical response,” he stated.
Acted almost like fluid
For instance, when a Japanese probe dropped a tinny explosive near the surface of the Ryugu asteroid in 2019, it was expected to make a crater of 2 or three meters. Instead, it blasted a 50-meter hole.
“There was no resistance,” Michel said.
” The surface acted almost like a fluid” rather than solid rock, he added. “How weird is that?”
One way the Hera objective will test Dimorphos will be to land a nano-satellite on its surface, in part to observe how much it bounces.
Binary systems such as Dimorphos and Didymos represent around fifteen percent of known asteroids but have not yet been explored.
With a size of just 160 meters– around the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza– Dimorphos will also be the tinniest asteroid ever studied.
Learning regarding the impact of DART is not only crucial for planetary defense, Michel said, but also for understanding the background of our Solar System, where most cosmic bodies were formed through collisions and are currently riddled with craters.
That’s where DART and also Hera could shine a light not only on the future but on the past.
Read the original article on PHYS.
