The European Space Agency is set to launch its first planetary defense mission, Hera, complementing NASA’s 2022 DART mission. Scheduled for launch on October 7, Hera will travel to the Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system to study the impact of DART’s collision, which altered Dimorphos’s orbit. The mission, initially difficult to fund, evolved from the “Don Quijote” concept and will begin its six-month study in 2026. Discussions with NASA’s Applied Physics Lab in 2011 helped advance the mission’s development.