University of Helsinki posted on Facebook

Researchers are preparing nanosatellites and developing instruments for them to study asteroids. The Hera mission aims to find out whether the studied asteroids hold any valuable minerals in short supply on Earth. Another goal of the mission is to study how a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid impacts its trajectory, thus potentially enabling the development of means to intercept asteroids coming into Earth's orbit.

University of Helsinki posted on Facebook

A collaborative project between ESA, the European Space Agency, and NASA called The Hera mission, will look for space mining possibilities from asteroids. It aims to determine mineral compositions and evaluate the usage of nanosatellites in this job. Tomas Kohout, an Academy of Finland research fellow at the University of Helsinki, is leading an international research group preparing a nanosatellite to be flown on ESA’s Hera mission.

University of Helsinki posted on Facebook

30 June is the global Asteroid Day, held on the anniversary of the most harmful known asteroid-related event on Earth in recent history. Fit for the occasion, researchers have just managed to calculate perfectly where the fragments of a meteorite that hit Russia last week landed. The calculations were based on video records of the fireball on the Russian sky. Asteroid Day at Helsinki Observatory https://museot.fi/nayttelykalenteri/index.php?nayttely_id=18732