In the first episode of The incredible adventures of the Hera mission, we learned about asteroids and how the DART mission will form a crater on an asteroid.
In episode two, we will learn about “The curious case of the missing planet,” which actually was just a misunderstanding of what astronomers were actually seeing in the 18th century.
The story is a fascinating tale about the accidental discovery of the very first asteroid in 1801 by astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi – a small object 1000 kilometers (600 miles) in diameter between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Piazzi named the object Ceres.
Asteroids are numbered in order of their discovery and many have been named. For example, the first asteroid discovered is 1 Ceres, the second is 2 Pallas, etc. More than 400,000 asteroids have been discovered in the main asteroid belt.
Let’s fast forward to October 2024 and the launch of Hera, the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) part of an international planetary defense project. It will send the Hera spacecraft and two CubeSats—”Milani the rock decoder and Juventas the radar visionary”—to study Asteroid Didymos and its “moonlet” Dimorphos.
The mission will take two years with a 2026 post-impact survey that includes observing the asteroids’ surfaces and interiors with a variety of instruments: an optical camera, lidar (laser radar), a thermal infrared scanner, a spectrometer, and more.
Hera, named after the Greek Goddess of marriage, will analyze the aftermath of NASA’s DART mission, in which a spacecraft will intentionally strike an asteroid’s moon. The information Hera and her CubeSats collect will be critically important for understanding the future of planetary defense technology.
The information Hera and her two CubeSats relay back to Earth after the DART mission could be similar to a call with customer support and Hera is the survey afterward that asks “how did we do?”
On Tuesday, the ESA’s EStrack network of ground stations, Europe’s ‘eyes on the sky, “will be particularly focused on the DART spacecraft and will be closely monitoring its every move as it closes in on the 160-meter-wide moving target in the world’s first test of asteroid deflection.
The impact with the asteroid will be filmed by a small camera. The LICIACube, short for Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids, successfully popped out of its spring-loaded box on September 11, exactly 15 days before the scheduled impact.
