The dinosaurs had no such ability to deflect the Chicxulub impactor which wiped them out 66 million years ago.
Once it arrives in late 2026, Hera will carry out a crash-scene investigation in deep space to determine exactly what happened after DART’s explosive impact on Dimorphos. It will use its own micro satellites to get close to the asteroid, as well as a range of onboard sensors to determine everything from cracks in the central asteroid structure to assessing the composition of any dust floating around it.
It’s all part of plans to have mankind ready to counter asteroid oblivion by 2030.
“This is not an abstract risk that we’re up against, this is reality,” said ESA’s Rolf Densing, who runs operations at the space agency and monitored the launch from the Darmstadt center in southern Germany, adding that “our Earth is bombarded with objects.”
There are 36,000 objects with a diameter of more than 100 meters in ESA’s asteroid database, with 1,668 on the watchlist with a non-zero chance of hitting Earth. A couple of those are thought to be potentially worthy of a closer look in the future, though none are thought to be species-killers — yet.
That doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.
