ESA plans to return to the asteroid nudged off course last year by NASA's DART mission

A new ESA mission is heading back to the asteroid nudged off course when it crashed a spacecraft onto its surface last year.

Transcript

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00:14 >> The HERA mission is ESA's first mission to an asteroid,

00:18 and a very special asteroid that was impacted by the NASA mission DART to test

00:24 for the first time if we can deflect an asteroid and protect Earth from asteroids.

00:29 What HERA will do is to complement the NASA mission by gathering all the information

00:35 the scientists need to validate numerical impact code, which means to be able

00:41 to design a mission in the future should an asteroid come toward us.

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01:07 >> The HERA mission for the first time will bring a radar, which will allow us

01:11 to get the internal structure of the asteroid, and will bring a suit of instruments

01:16 like a thermal camera, a multispectral camera to understand the properties of this asteroid.

01:21 And this is fundamental information to complement the data from DART in order to be able

01:27 to use this technique in future asteroids.

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