Asteroid's moon gets a name before NASA's DART mission crashes into it in 2022

The DART mission will target the near-Earth asteroid’s moon Dimorphos when it relatively close In the second half of 2022. NASA’s DART will crash into Dimorphos In the second half of 2022, the near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos will be relatively close of Earth. “That’s the key measurement that will tell us how the asteroid responded to our deflection effort.” ESA’s Hera mission – a follow-up A few years after DART’s impact, the European Space Agency plans to launch Hera, a mission to investigate Didymos and Dimorphos to collect more data. While the DART mission was developed as part of NASA’s Planetary Defense missions, the team of scientists and engineers will work with ESA’s Hera mission team under a larger, international collaboration called the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment, or AIDA.