In a bid to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, a new European spacecraft has been launched from the coast of Florida. The Hera mission is heading to an asteroid whose orbit was changed by NASA two years ago.
The car-sized orbiter was launched from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Hera project, led by the European Space Agency, is the latest in a series of spacecraft that will support humanity’s global efforts to develop a strategy to protect our planet from dangerous space objects.
Walter Pelzer, Director General of DLR, the German space agency:
If we fail to protect our planet, it will be the end of humanity, the end of the Earth as we know it.
Dr Pelzer added that with Hurricane Milton approaching the Florida Gulf Coast, he was relieved to see that the launch had gone smoothly and without incident.
Science fiction fans have long speculated that the threat of an asteroid or comet hurtling toward our planet would be eliminated with a nuclear blast. Movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact, and most recently, Don’t Look Up, have only reinforced this idea of how to protect Earth. But scientists have discovered that a more realistic option—though far less dramatic—is to simply deflect the incoming rock. This is known as kinetic impact deflection.