AIDA (international space cooperation)
pair of space missions by NASA and ESA to demonstrate and study the effect of impacting a spacecraft into an asteroid moon
The Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) missions are a proposed pair of space probes which will study and demonstrate the kinetic effects of crashing an impactor spacecraft into an asteroid moon. The mission is intended to test and validate impact models of whether a spacecraft could successfully deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
The original plan called for a European spacecraft, the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), to operate in synergy with a large NASA impactor called Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) and observe the immediate effects of the impact. AIM was cancelled in 2016 when Germany was unable to fund its portion, and after some backlash within European Space Agency (ESA), AIM was replaced in 2018 with a smaller spacecraft called Hera that launched three years after DART to orbit and study the crater on the asteroid. Hera will also deploy two European CubeSats in deep space for close-up asteroid surveying: Juventas and Milani.
DART impacted Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet of 65803 Didymos, on 26 September 2022. Hera will arrive at Didymos in December 2026, four years and three months after DART's impact.
History
Initially, Hera's role was to be realized by a much larger spacecraft called Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM), that would have observed the plume, the crater, and the freshly exposed material to provide unique information for asteroid deflection, science and mining communities. In December 2016, the European Space Agency (ESA) cancelled the development of the AIM spacecraft after Germany decided to fund the ExoMars project only. Germany offered to cover only 35 million of the 60 million needed for the AIM portion to continue, and this was not enough to continue development.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “AIDA (international space cooperation)” as pair of space missions by NASA and ESA to demonstrate and study the effect of impacting a spacecraft into an asteroid moon. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4651847. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2018, 2022 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “AIDA (international space cooperation)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.