![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/f9_hera_spacex-3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with ESA\u2019s Hera mission.<\/p>\n
Credit:
\n SpaceX<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
This was probably the final opportunity to launch Hera before the spaceport shutters in advance of Hurricane Milton, a dangerous Category 5 storm taking aim at the west coast of Florida. If the mission didn\u2019t launch Monday, SpaceX was prepared to move the Falcon 9 rocket and the Hera spacecraft back inside a hangar for safekeeping until the storm passes.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center a few miles away, SpaceX is securing a Falcon Heavy rocket with the Europa Clipper spacecraft to ride out Hurricane Milton inside a hangar at Launch Complex 39A. Europa Clipper is a $5.2 billion flagship mission to explore Jupiter\u2019s most enigmatic icy moon, and it was supposed to launch Thursday, the same day Hurricane Milton will potentially move over Central Florida.<\/p>\n
NASA announced Sunday that it is postponing Europa Clipper\u2019s launch until after the storm.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe safety of launch team personnel is our highest priority, and all precautions will be taken to protect the Europa Clipper spacecraft,\u201d said Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA\u2019s Launch Services Program. \u201cOnce we have the \u2018all-clear\u2019 followed by facility assessment and any recovery actions, we will determine the next launch opportunity for this NASA flagship mission.\u201d<\/p>\n
Europa Clipper must launch by November 6 in order to reach Jupiter and its moon Europa in 2030. ESA\u2019s Hera mission had a similarly tight window to get off the ground in October and arrive at asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos in December 2026.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Returning to flight<\/h2>\n
The Falcon 9 did its job Monday, accelerating the Hera spacecraft to a blistering speed of 26,745 mph (43,042 km\/hr) with successive burns by its first stage booster and upper stage engine. This was the highest-speed payload injection ever achieved by SpaceX.<\/p>\n
SpaceX did not attempt to recover the Falcon 9\u2019s reusable booster on Monday\u2019s flight because Hera needed all of the rocket\u2019s oomph to gain enough speed to escape the pull of Earth\u2019s gravity.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood launch, good orbit, and good payload deploy,\u201d wrote Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of launch, on X.<\/p>\n
This was the first Falcon 9 launch in nine days\u2014an unusually long gap between SpaceX missions\u2014after the rocket\u2019s upper stage misfired during a maneuver to steer itself out of orbit following an otherwise successful launch September 28 with a two-man crew heading for the International Space Station.<\/p>\n
The upper stage engine apparently \u201cover-burned,\u201d and the rocket debris fell into the atmosphere short of its expected reentry corridor in the Pacific Ocean, sources said. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Falcon 9 rocket while SpaceX investigates the malfunction, but the FAA granted approval for SpaceX to launch the Hera mission because its trajectory would carry the rocket away from Earth, rather than back into the atmosphere for reentry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe FAA has determined that the absence of a second stage reentry for this mission adequately mitigates the primary risk to the public in the event of a reoccurrence of the mishap experienced with the Crew-9 mission,\u201d the FAA said in a statement.<\/p>\n Members of the Hera team from ESA and its German prime contractor, OHB, pose with the spacecraft inside SpaceX\u2019s payload processing facility in Florida.<\/p>\n Credit: This was the third time the FAA has grounded SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket fleet in less than three months, following another upper stage failure in July that caused the destruction of 20 Starlink Internet satellites and the crash-landing of a Falcon 9 booster on an offshore drone ship in August. Federal regulators are responsible for ensuring commercial rocket launches don\u2019t endanger the public.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n These were the first major anomalies on any Falcon 9 launch since 2021.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear when the FAA will clear SpaceX to resume launching other Falcon 9 missions. However, the launch of the Europa Clipper mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket, which uses essentially the same upper stage as a Falcon 9, is not licensed by the FAA because it is managed by NASA, another government agency. NASA will have final authority on whether to give the green light for the launch of Europa Clipper.<\/p>\n ESA\u2019s Hera spacecraft is on course for a flyby of Mars next March to take advantage of the red planet\u2019s gravity to slingshot itself on a trajectory to intercept its twin target asteroids. Near Mars, Hera will zoom relatively close to the planet\u2019s asteroid-like moon, Deimos, to obtain rare closeups.<\/p>\n Then, Hera will approach Didymos and Dimorphos a little more than two years from now, maneuvering around the binary asteroid system at a range of distances, eventually moving as close as about a half-mile (1 kilometer) away.<\/p>\n Italy\u2019s LICIACube spacecraft snapped this image of asteroids Didymos (lower left) and Dimorphos (upper right) a few minutes after the impact of DART on September 26, 2022.<\/p>\n Credit: Dimorphos orbits Didymos once every 11 hours and 23 minutes, roughly 32 minutes shorter than the orbital period before DART\u2019s impact in 2022. This change in orbit proved the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor in deflecting an asteroid that threatens Earth.<\/p>\n Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, has a diameter of around 500 feet (150 meters), while Didymos measures approximately a half-mile (780 meters) wide. Neither asteroid poses a risk to Earth, so NASA chose them as the objective for DART.<\/p>\n The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a debris field trailing the binary asteroid system after DART\u2019s impact. Astronomers identified at least 37 boulders drifting away from the asteroids, material ejected when the DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos at a velocity of 14,000 mph (22,500 kmh).<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Scientists will use Hera, with its suite of cameras and instruments, to study how the strike by DART changed the asteroid Dimorphos. Did the impact leave a crater, or did it reshape the entire asteroid? There are \u201ctentative hints\u201d that the asteroid\u2019s shape changed after the collision, according to Michael Kueppers, Hera\u2019s project scientist at ESA.<\/p>\n \u201cIf this is the case, it would also mean that the cohesion of Dimorphos is extremely low; that indeed, even an object the size of Dimorphos would be held together by its weight, by its gravity, and not by cohesion,\u201d Kueppers said. \u201cSo it really would be a rubble pile.\u201d<\/p>\n Hera will also measure the mass of Dimorphos, something DART was unable to do. \u201cThat is important to measure the efficiency of the impact\u2026 which was the momentum that was transferred from the impacting satellite to the asteroid,\u201d Kueppers said.<\/p>\n This NASA\/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly three months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA\u2019s DART mission. Hubble\u2019s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision.<\/p>\n Credit: The central goal of Hera is to fill the gaps in knowledge about Didymos and Dimorphos. Precise measurements of DART\u2019s momentum, coupled with a better understanding of the interior structure of the asteroids, will allow future mission planners to know how best to deflect a hazardous object threatening Earth.<\/p>\n \u201cThe third part is to generally investigate the two asteroids to know their physical properties, their interior properties, their strength, essentially to be able to extrapolate or to scale the outcome of DART to another impact should we really need it one day,\u201d Kueppers said.<\/p>\n Hera will release two briefcase-size CubeSats, named Juventas and Milani, to work in concert with ESA\u2019s mothership. Juventas carries a compact radar to probe the internal structure of the smaller asteroid and will eventually attempt a landing on Dimorphos. Milani will study the mineral composition of individual boulders around DART\u2019s impact site.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first time that we send a spacecraft to a small body, which is actually a multi-satellite system, with one main spacecraft and two CubeSats doing closer proximity operations,\u201d Michel said. \u201cThis has never been done.\u201d<\/p>\n Artist\u2019s illustration of the Hera spacecraft with its two deployable CubeSats, Juventas and Milani, in the vicinity of the Didymos binary asteroid system. The CubeSats will communicate with ground teams via radio links with the Hera mothership.<\/p>\n Credit: One source of uncertainty, and perhaps worry, about the environment around Didymos and Dimorphos is the status of the debris field observed by Hubble a few months after DART\u2019s impact. But this is not likely to be a problem, according to Kueppers.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not really worried about potential boulders at Didymos,\u201d he said, recalling the relative ease with which ESA\u2019s Rosetta spacecraft navigated around an active comet from 2014 through 2016.<\/p>\n Ignacio Tanco, ESA\u2019s flight director for Hera, doesn\u2019t share Kuepper\u2019s optimism.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t hit the comet with a hammer,\u201d said Tanco, who is responsible for keeping the Hera spacecraft safe. \u201cThe debris question for me is actually a source of\u2026 I wouldn\u2019t say concern, but certainly precaution. It\u2019s something that we\u2019ll need to approach carefully once we get there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the difference between an engineer and a scientist,\u201d Kuepper joked.<\/p>\n Scientists originally wanted Hera to be in the vicinity of the Didymos binary asteroid system before DART\u2019s arrival, allowing it to directly observe the impact and its fallout. But ESA\u2019s member states did not approve funding for the Hera mission in time, and the space agency only signed the contract to build the Hera spacecraft in 2020.<\/p>\n ESA first studied a mission like DART and Hera more than 20 years ago, when scientists proposed a mission called Don Quijote to get an asteroid deflection. But other missions took priority in Europe\u2019s space program. Now, Hera is on course to write the final chapter of the story of humanity\u2019s first planetary defense test.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is our contribution of ESA to humanity to help us in the future protect our planet,\u201d said Josef Aschbacher, ESA\u2019s director general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two years ago, a NASA spacecraft smashed into a small asteroid millions of miles from Earth to test a technique that could one day prove useful to deflect an object off a collision course with Earth. The European Space Agency launched a follow-up mission Monday to go back to the crash site and see the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4365,291,1285,831,479,1656,1286,25,1287,316],"class_list":["post-44698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-asteroid","tag-commercial-space","tag-dart","tag-european-space-agency","tag-falcon-9","tag-federal-aviation-administration","tag-hera","tag-launch","tag-planetary-defense","tag-spacex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Hera_team_with_spacecraft.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n SpaceX<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nSurveying the damage<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/liciacube.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n ASI\/NASA<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/heic2307a.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Hera_and_its_CubeSats_connected_by_inter-satellite_links-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n ESA-Science Office<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n