July 2019
Who owns outer space?
..., the European Space Agency is planning the Hera mission, which is designed to map the surface of the paired Didymos asteroids when they come relatively close to the Earth in 2022. NASA’s ‘DART’ spaceship will then attempt...
29 June 2018
All things asteroid: Who, What, Where and When
... itself into a 160 metre moonlet informally called ‘Didymoon,’ that is one half of a binary asteroid system called Didymos. The collision, which is due to take place in October 2022, will lead to a change in the duration of Didymoon’s orbit...
29 November 2019
Hera mission is approved as ESA receives biggest ever budget
.... Due to launch in 2024, Hera is the European contribution to an international double-spacecraft collaboration. After travelling to the Didymos pair of near-Earth asteroids two years ahead of Hera, ESA’s partner NASA, will first perform a kinetic...
11 October 2021
Disrupting Earth-bound asteroids with nukes is “very effective”, new study says
... be the focus of real targets when NASA’s DART mission reaches its target – a binary asteroid system comprised of Didymos and its small moonlet asteroid Dimorphos – in late 2022. However, this method needs time to be implemented, so if a large...
24 March 2023
Close approach to Earth and Moon of newly discovered asteroid
... of changing the orbit of an asteroid. The spacecraft successfully crashed into the smaller moonlet of a binary asteroid system (Didymos and Dimorphos) about seven million miles from Earth in September last year at a speed of about 15,000 mph...
