Together, they will intercept with a binary asteroid system, a poorly-understood category constituting approximately 15 percent of asteroids.
Hera is the European contribution to an international planetary defence collaboration dubbed the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA).
NASA’s part of the project is scheduled to blast-off in July 2021 and will first perform a what has been described as a “kinetic impact” on the smaller of the two bodies.
This involves crashing an impactor spacecraft into the asteroid, which is predicted to make a crater of 6 to 17m across.
source: express.co.uk