The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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Hera is a candidate mission that will be humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system – a little-understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids. It is an interdisciplinary mission to find out more about this type of asteroid and to investigate asteroid deflection.
Impacts of small space rocks with Earth are relatively common, and although larger impacts are rarer, they can cause catastrophic damage. The effects of an asteroid impact on Earth depends on many factors, such as the location of impact, trajectory and physical properties of the asteroid.
We do have the technology available to mitigate such a threat from an asteroid, but it has never been tested in realistic conditions. Moreover, the design of an efficient mitigation strategy relies on our understanding of the physical properties of threatening objects and their response to a mitigation tool, which is still extremely poor. Hera will significantly improve our understanding.