Asteroid mission aims to save humans from the fate of the dinosaurs – POLITICO

DARMSTADT, Germany — Call it planetary defense: the race to avoid the fate of our reptilian relatives with a mission to see if humans can divert an asteroid before it smashes into the Earth.

On Monday, the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Hera spacecraft was launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Hera will fly for over a year to reach the Dimorphos asteroid, which was the target for NASA's 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission that smashed a satellite into it at speeds of over 20,000 kilometers per hour.

The NASA spacecraft hit the roughly 160 meters in diameter Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid — the 780 meter Didymos. The aim of the mission was to find out how much that impact changed the asteroid's trajectory with a view of fending off future space-rock threats using the same technique to avoid a fiery collision with Earth.