ESA officially announced its first space mission to save the Earth

The HERA mission will cost $ 153 million, but this is a small cost if it comes to developing an effective method to neutralize space rocks that will end up in a collision orbit with Earth.

The historic mission is to start in 2024, and the probe is to reach a pair of asteroids in 2026.

It is a double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. The main asteroid is 780 meters in diameter and has a satellite 160 meters in diameter.

Didymos in October 2022 will be approx. 11 million kilometers from Earth.

The task of the American device called DART will be to hit the asteroid and change its flight trajectory so that it does not hit our planet, while the mission of the European HERA probe will be to approach the asteroids and carefully study them.

Several CubeSat microsatellites will also be launched from HERA into space, which will map the objects and record the course of the entire event.

ESA also wants to test autonomous microdevice navigation.

This technology could later be used in asteroid space mining missions. The plan is for a 300 kilogram DART probe to hit the smaller asteroid at 6 km / s (22,000 km / h).

It will be the first mission to test the so-called

space rock kinetic impact technology.

Didymos belongs to the Amora group, i.e. objects that potentially threaten our planet, which is why it is such a great object for astronomers to research on the creation of the Earth protection system.

The impact is expected to change the asteroid's orbit by a few millimeters.

It seems little, but it is enough to change the trajectory over a distance of millions of kilometers of its flight that the object will bypass the Earth.The Planetary Science Journal reports that when the probe hits the surface of the asteroid, material will be ejected into space

rock, the stream of which will be directed towards our planet.

Meteoroids bursting into the atmosphere can create a breathtaking spectacle of shooting stars.

Let's just hope that no big rocks fall to Earth, because if it happens over metropolises, they could lead to a cataclysm. The DART and HERA mission will undoubtedly be one of the most daring missions in human history.

Interestingly, SpaceX will also join the project.

Elon Musk's company will be responsible for launching the DART vehicle into space using the Falcon-9 rocket.

The launch is to take place in June 2021 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Let's keep our fingers crossed for the HERA / AIDA and DART missions to be successful and for scientists to achieve their goals.

This is because the peaceful future of our existence on the Blue Planet will depend on it.