"It seems like we hit it hard enough and we reshaped it," says Harrison Agrusa, a Hera team member and a planetary scientist at the Côte d'Azur Observatory (OCA) in Nice, France.
"It would have been better to have the full characteristics, but we can live with that," says Patrick Michel, a planetary scientist at the OCA and Hera's mission lead. "Fortunately, the outcome of the DART mission gives us useful data."
The €363-million mission is a follow-up to NASA's DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, providing evidence that deflecting asteroids could be feasible.
The solar-powered spacecraft, the size of a small car, will take two years to reach its target, arriving in late 2026 to study the impact of DART.
Collection
[
|
...
]