HERA Europe’s asteroid mission to defend Earth

We all know that accidents can happen, but 2020 will be remembered as a year of catastrophe. The upshot is we have to pay greater attention to all kinds of near misses, including those from space in the shape of incoming asteroids, and on 30 June we do just that as the world marks Asteroid Day. Similarly, 2022 should also be a year to remember but in a quite different way. That October, humankind will test out responding to the asteroid threat by slamming a desk-sized NASA spacecraft called DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, into the moonlet of a near-Earth asteroid at 6.6km per second.