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ESA HERA Mission

ESA HERA Mission

ESA HERA Mission https://asteroidday.org/wp-content/themes/fildisi/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 Asteroid Day Asteroid Day https://asteroidday.org/wp-content/themes/fildisi/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg

ESA is an Asteroid Day partner and is leading the development of HERA. Hera – named after the Greek goddess of marriage – is a candidate ESA mission that will be humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids.
Hera is the European contribution to an international double-spacecraft mission. NASA will first perform a kinetic impact on the smaller of the two bodies, then Hera will follow-up with a detailed post-impact survey that will turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique.