ESA’s Hera mission lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Area Power Station in Florida, USA, on 7 October at 10:52 native time (16:52 CEST, 14:52 UTC).

Hera is ESA’s first planetary defence mission. It should fly to a singular goal among the many 1.3 million asteroids in our Photo voltaic System – the one physique to have had its orbit shifted by human motion – to resolve lingering unknowns related to its deflection.

Hera will perform the primary detailed survey of a ‘binary’ – or double-body – asteroid, 65803 Didymos, which is orbited by a smaller physique, Dimorphos. Hera’s major focus shall be Dimorphos, whose orbit round the primary physique was beforehand altered by NASA’s kinetic-impacting DART spacecraft.

By sharpening scientific understanding of this ‘kinetic influence’ strategy of asteroid deflection, Hera ought to flip the experiment right into a well-understood and repeatable approach for shielding Earth from an asteroid on a collision course.