ESA’s Hera spacecraft is scheduled to arrive in the coming month to conduct an inspection of the results of NASA’s DART mission, which struck the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. The collision created observable changes in the binary system and Hera will visit the aftermath to characterize what happened.
Hera targets the binary pair Dimorphos–Didymos and is designed to rendezvous with the system, studying the impact’s effects from close range. The spacecraft travels at high speed as it approaches the asteroids, and ESA has released material describing how the mission may look and what it could reveal about the altered bodies.
While outlets focus on different aspects—one emphasizes the “wreckage” and the follow-up inspection of DART’s outcomes, and another highlights Hera’s mission timing and the binary nature of the target—the accounts converge on the same objective: using Hera to assess the consequences of the first planetary defense test and refine understanding of how such kinetic impacts affect asteroid orbits and structure.
