Planetary Defense

ESA’s Hera mission progresses towards launch pending Falcon 9 readiness

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An artist’s rendering of the Hera spacecraft alongside the CubeSats, Juventas and Milani. Graphic: ESA The European Space Agency is on the cusp of launching its first planetary defense mission, a complement to NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The goal of these missions is to understand how Earth can be protected from …

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Launch of asteroid deflection demonstrator slips to November

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NASA’s DART spacecraft is prepared for thermal testing in February. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman The launch of a NASA spacecraft designed to smash into an asteroid to try out a technique that could protect Earth from threatening space rocks has slipped from July until November, at the earliest, after development delays partially caused by …

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