For scientists and engineers dedicated to a space exploration mission, the investment is measured in years and nothing is more painful than seeing the ship die before it has gone into action. This was, for example, the case of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cluster mission, lost in the explosion of the Ariane-5 during its maiden flight in 1996, or of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, destroyed upon reaching Mars. in 1999 due to a deplorable confusion between the metric system and Anglo-Saxon units, or, more recently, with the Indian lunar lander Chandrayaan-2, which crashed into our satellite in 2019.
But there are less spectacular deaths, missions in which space agencies wring their necks even before the probes are built, in the tranquility of budget arbitrations. This is how ESA’s asteroid impact mission (AIM) died in 2016, which was to observe the impact of the American kamikaze ship DART (by “double asteroid deflection test”) on Dimorphos, a small asteroid that forms a double system with its brother Major Didymos. . The aim was to determine if it was possible to deflect a possible “killer asteroid” that threatened to devastate the Earth.
Very involved in the AIM issue, Patrick Michel, CNRS research director at the Côte d’Azur Observatory, remembers this cancellation as “the worst moment of [sa] career “. “I cried a lotadmits. It was horrible. » Patrick Michel is consoled today because the ESA has “remounted” another mission of the same type, Hera, with a budget of 390 million euros, which will take off on Monday, October 7 from Cape Canaveral (Florida), aboard a SpaceX. Falcon-9 rocket.
“A different world”
Of course, the DART ship did not wait. Launched at 22,000 km/h, it crashed into Dimorphos in September 2022, while the European probe will not arrive until October 2026 to assess the damage. However, says Patrick Michel, also scientific director of Hera, “Four years after the impact, its consequences will not have changed”. The American probe sent photographs of the area it was going to impact. Therefore, researchers will be able to make a before and after comparison. “It is difficult to make a predictionexplains the astrophysicist. We may have left a crater or completely deformed the asteroid. Therefore, we will see a completely different world than the DART images. » Even Didymos could have changed its appearance if rocks ejected from its neighbor’s surface bombarded it.
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