Hera mission infographic

Due for launch in October 2024, ESA's Hera spacecraft for asteroid planetary defence will spend two years flying to the Didymos binary asteroid system. There it will focus on the smaller of the two bodies, Dimorphos, which has previously had its orbit around its parent shifted by an impact with NASA's DART spacecraft. Hera will gather additional data on the mass, structure and composition of the Great-Pyramid-sized asteroid, to transform the DART impact from a one-off experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable technique that could be used for real if ever needed against an oncoming asteroid.