Everything Hera

Once a month, space pioneer Carsten Borowy shares his knowledge about space. Just in time for Asteroid Day on June 30, episode 12 of "TwoMinutesOfSpace" deals with asteroids and how Earth can be protected from them.

Mark Fittock, project manager for the asteroid defense mission Hera, has agreed to answer some of the open questions about asteroids.

Research into and protection from asteroids are global tasks. For this reason, OHB has been supporting Asteroid Day for several years, which always takes place on June 30.

The dangers from space are ever-present – space junk, space weather and asteroids whirl and tumble around the Earth and, from time to time, come dangerously close to it and to satellites in orbit. “The time for action is now,” said Marc Scheper, Head of the Space Transport, Robotic Missions & Exploration departments, thus demonstrating the urgency with which the space nations must deal with the issue of threats from space.
Reason enough to dedicate the Bremen session of the #SpaceTalks series of the European Space Agency ESA to this issue. Which missions are currently dealing with warding off and exploring these threats is what the former ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter, Chiara Manfletti (ESA Programme Advisor to the Director General), Marc Scheper, host Dr. Timo Stuffler (Head of Business Development at OHB) and an audience of space enthusiasts talked about and discussed at the #SpaceTalks held at the OHB headquarters in Bremen today.

“The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk was a wake-up call,” says Zhu Qing-Yin of the University of California. He has performed chemical analyses of the fragments of the celestial stone which exploded over the Russian city in February 2013. “If humanity is to avoid the fate that befell the dinosaurs, the results of these analyses must be examined very carefully.”

Marco Fuchs, CEO of OHB, on the danger of catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth.