SpaceX Scheduled to Launch Hera Mission from Cape Canaveral Monday Morning
BREVARD COUNTY • – SpaceX will launch the Hera European Space Agency mission Monday morning from Cape Canaveral to study the Didymos binary asteroid system that was impacted by the DART mission.
Launch is targeted for 10:52 a.m. ET.
As part of the world's first test of asteroid deflection, Hera will perform a detailed post-impact survey of the target asteroid, Dimorphos – the orbiting moonlet of a binary asteroid system known as Didymos.
Now that NASA's DART mission has impacted the moonlet, Hera will turn the grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique.
Demonstrating new technologies from autonomous navigation around an asteroid to low gravity proximity operations, Hera will be humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system and Europe's flagship Planetary Defender.
