Planetary defense is a growing concern among the scientific community, as efforts have been made to design and implement missions meant to deflect incoming threats to the Earth well in advance. In 2022, NASA intentionally collided the Double Asteroid Redirection test (DART) planetary defense spacecraft into the smaller asteroid of the binary asteroid, Didymos and Dimorphos, with the latter being the smaller one. While the goal was to ascertain if deflecting an asteroid is feasible, how did this influence the geological characteristics of Dimorphos, and what can it teach us about planetary defense missions?

This is the task of a brave robotic explorer known as Hera, which is a spacecraft mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA) in cooperation with NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Hera recently sent back its first image of Didymos and Dimorphos, which orbit each other as they orbit the Sun, with the image revealing the two asteroids separated, as opposed to seeing a single dot.…