Goals of the Hera mission

Hera is a candidate mission to find out more about binary asteroid systems and to investigate asteroid deflection. It's four main goals are planetary defence, human exploration, science and resource utilisation.

Hera will achieve its goals by studying a host of properties of the two asteroids in the system – named Didymos and Didymoon. Such properties include the asteroids' orbital and rotation states, surface properties, internal structure and composition. Hera will also validate an asteroid deflection technique – which may be necessary if a large asteroid ever comes close enough to Earth to pose a significant threat!