Gemeinsame Veranstaltung mit dem Italienischen Generalkonsulat
(Event in English)
Planetary Defense Activities at the European Space Agency
The Earth has always been the target of destructive impacts by asteroids and comets, the largest of which caused catastrophic effects at global level, and even extinction level events like the one in the Gulf of Mexico about 65 million years ago. These events are fortunately infrequent, but they will certainly happen again.
However, we are now in the space age, and we have to opportunity to set up systems that identify potentially dangerous celestial objects, predict future collision events with large notice and take measures to avoid them. This new field of science and technology is called Planetary defense.
The European Space Agency, together with other institutional organisations around the world, is very active in the field of planetary defense. In addition to setting up a network of monitoring telescopes that search and track near Earth asteroids, ESA is working on two important space missions: Hera, has launched last year, a mission to reach and study Didymos, an asteroid that was target of a NASA deflection experiment in 2022; and Ramses, a mission to Apophis, a small asteroid that will make a close fly-by of Earth in April 2029.
This lecture will introduce the field of planetary defense, discussing the activities currently carried out in this field and describing in detail the objectives and the challenges of the two missions Hera and Ramses.
