ESA's Hera Will View Asteroid Scars from DART's Strike (spectrum.ieee.org)

I'm quite excited by planetary defense missions. While I don't think that anyone has any reason to be fearful of the constant danger of being wiped out by an asteroid, in my mind it marks a big milestone for us as a species to be able to (in not so distant future) protect ourselves from something that wiped out dinosaurs. Just feels like a mission that is not driven by global power struggles/projections, but is just a positive for everyone.

It seems weird to think about how much more developed we are as a species, and yet so far we are still vulnerable to the same incident that ended their reign over this planet, completely out of their (and our) control.

Quite impressive this spacecraft will really orbit around a binary asteroid system using a camera-based autonomous navigation system

From the name, I wondered how this was going to be related to HERA (it isn't), a radio telescope array in South Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_Epoch_of_Reionization...

ESA must defend against Trump-NASA. Recently the USA threatened Europeans again if they "prevent" entry of US-Starlink and other AI slop spam working for Putin. The USA has become a security risk not only for Ukrainians but all Europans under agent Krasnov.

Spent time doing shape modeling from flyby imagery and the thing I'm most curious about is whether they get good enough lighting geometry on the crater rim.