MIAMI: Europe's Hera probe launched on Monday on a mission to inspect the damage done by a Nasa spacecraft when it smashed into an asteroid during the first test of Earth's planetary defences.
Despite fears that an approaching hurricane could delay the launch, the probe blasted off on a SpaceX rocket into cloudy skies from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida just before 11:00 am local time.
Hera's mission is to investigate the aftermath of Nasa's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which deliberately crashed into the Dimorphos asteroid in 2022 roughly 11 million kilometres from Earth.
The fridge-sized DART spacecraft successfully knocked the asteroid well off course, demonstrating that humanity may no longer be powerless against potentially planet-killing asteroids that could head our way.
The European Space Agency (ESA) said the Hera craft will investigate what it has called the "crime scene" in the hopes of learning how Earth can best fend off future space rocks.
The launch was met with applause from teams on the ground, according to an ESA broadcast.
Poor weather ahead of Hurricane Milton had put the launch into doubt, with SpaceX warning on Sunday that there was only a 15 per cent chance of a launch.
Milton is the latest hurricane to hit the Gulf of Mexico after the deadly Hurricane Helene. It has been classified as "an extremely dangerous category 4 hurricane" and is expected to slam into Florida in the coming days.
The launch had also faced a potential delay due to an anomaly involving a Falcon 9 rocket during the launch of SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut mission late last month.
But on Sunday, the US Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light.
Hera is planned to fly past Mars next year and then arrive near Dimorphos in December 2026 to begin its six-month investigation.
Dimorphos, which is actually a moonlet orbiting its big brother Didymos, never posed a threat to Earth.
After DART's impact, Dimorphos shed material to the point where its orbit around Didymos was shortened by 33 minutes -- proof that it was successfully deflected.
But much about the impact remains unknown, including how much damage was done and exactly what the asteroid -- which is about the size of an Egyptian pyramid -- was like before it was hit.
Analysis of the DART mission has suggested that rather than being a single hard rock, Dimorphos was more a loose pile of rubble held together by gravity.
"The consequence of this is that, instead of making a crater" on Dimorphos, DART may have "completely deformed" the asteroid, the Hera mission's principal investigator Patrick Michel told a press conference.
But there are other possibilities, he said, adding that the behaviour of these low-gravity objects is little understood and "defies intuition". — AFP
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