00:00HEDA is the first planetary defense mission of the European Space Agency.
00:22This is a new program that we have created recently and the aim is to study and promote
00:28means of planetary defense, so to be able to defend the Earth from future threats, including
00:36asteroid strikes.
00:58The important thing is that for the first time ever, humanity was able to alter the
01:21orbit of a celestial body.
01:24Now, we had models for this and what we saw is that the results of the impact were not
01:29what we expected.
01:30In fact, were quite different from what we expected.
01:33The change in the orbit was greater than what we would have imagined should have happened.
01:39We need to understand exactly why, improve our models, therefore we need to go there.
01:45HEDA will complete this task and we will have a better understanding of the dynamics and
01:51the internal structure of this asteroid.
02:51The mission will first go to Mars, so we don't have enough energy out of the rocket to get
03:18directly to the asteroid.
03:20We will use Mars to accelerate us, so we will get to Mars next year and then on 2026
03:25we will finally arrive at the asteroid.
03:28This will require very precise navigation, so the cruise phase is going to be very delicate.
03:34Once we get there, we will need to rendezvous, so do a very precise maneuvering to get ourselves
03:39very close to the asteroid.
03:41This again will be a significant challenge for the mission, but we are quite sure that
03:47we will achieve our ends, so we are getting trained and the teams here are getting prepared for it.
03:54Well, HEDA is a very challenging mission.
04:17It has been developed in a very different way from what other missions at ESA typically
04:23are done, so the development time was extremely compressed and in only four years we will
04:30be able to design, test and launch this mission.
04:34So for us, success means getting there, so demonstrating that this new way of doing missions
04:41for ESA is possible to do things very quickly and yet get there and get the results that
04:48we expect.
04:49So I would consider it a success when I start seeing the pictures of the asteroid up close
04:55by.
05:02Well, in the last decades we have understood that there is a threat in space.
05:19We have learned that there are still lots of material that originated from the creation
05:24of the solar system that is still orbiting in orbits which are close to the Earth.
05:30And we have started to discover them in great numbers.
05:34So we have understood that there is a threat of asteroids falling to the Earth and actually
05:39cause damage to our societies.
05:41So we have to protect ourselves against that and that's why the space agencies, and in
05:46particular the European Space Agency, is preparing in order to face that threat.
05:59Here is going to help us a lot in understanding what are the physical properties of asteroids.
06:05And this is very important for us because whenever we want to repeat this experiment
06:09or actually do it in order to defend the Earth from asteroids, it is very important to understand
06:14what is the reaction of these bodies to collisions or any other type of action that we might
06:19like to put on the asteroid.
06:22So it's very important to understand exactly what happened with the impact of that in Didymos,
06:27in Dimorphos, and understand exactly what are the properties in order to improve our
06:34models of how these deflection methodologies work.
06:44NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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