NASA Picks Scientists To Join Hera Asteroid Defense Mission

The mission will study the impact of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

“The objectives of DART and Hera collectively aim to validate the kinetic impact method as a technology to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, if one is ever discovered, and to learn more about the near-Earth asteroids that are the source of this natural hazard,” NASA said in a statement.

The spacecraft will gather data about the mass and composition of both bodies and assess the changes caused by the DART spacecraft’s kinetic impact, according to NASA.

The scientists selected by NASA will work to support the five-year Hera mission.

NASA said that among the questions Hera seeks to address are “outstanding questions in planetary defense and near-Earth asteroid science.”

Hera is scheduled to get to the Didymos/Dimorphos binary asteroid system at the end of 2026.

“DART was the first planetary defense test mission from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which oversees the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense,” NASA said in a statement.

DART was designed and built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

NASA is participating in a worldwide collaboration known as the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment.

The scientists include Bonnie Buratti from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, Carolyn Ernst and Dawn Graninger from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Mark Haynes with NASA JPL.

Also chosen were Masatoshi Hirabayashi of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; Tim Lister from Las Cumbres Observatory, Goleta, Calif; Ryan Park of NASA JPL; Andrew Rivkin from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; Daniel Scheeres of the University of Colorado, Boulder; Timothy Titus from the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Ariz.; and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Yun Zhang.