"Humans changed an asteroid. Now we find out how." | European Space Agency
June 30 is Asteroid Day—an annual global awareness campaign established to educate the public about asteroids and the potential hazards they pose to Earth.
Asteroid Day was co-founded in 2014 by astrophysicist Brian May, filmmaker Grigorij Richters, NASA astronaut Russel Schweickart, and Danica Remy of the B612 Foundation, following the Chelyabinsk meteor event in 2013. The United Nations officially recognized Asteroid Day in 2016, designating June 30 as the international observance to commemorate the Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteor airburst flattened over 2,150 km² of Siberian forest
On September 26, 2022, humans made our first measurable change to a Solar System object, as NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted the Dimorphos asteroid, shifting its orbit around its larger Didymos parent asteroid. This grand experiment was a success, but many unknowns remain.
How did the impact change the Great-Pyramid-sized asteroid?
Has it been left with a giant crater, sent spinning wildly or perhaps reshaped entirely?
Finding out will help make the ‘kinetic impactor’ method of planetary defence into a well-understood technique that could be deployed reliably if we ever need it.
This is why European Space Agency’s Hera Mission is on its way to Dimorphos to perform a close-up "crash scene" investigation. Arriving in autumn 2026, the suite of instruments aboard the spacecraft’s topside ‘Asteroid deck’ will perform a detailed survey of this binary asteroid system—binaries make up 15% of all known asteroids. Then, Hera will release a pair of shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ to fly even closer and eventually attempt to land.
Learn more about the Hera Mission:
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera
Duration: 3 minutes, 28 seconds
Release Date: June 30, 2026
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