article_snippet.sent: The European Space Agency's latest mission hopes to find out if crashing into The European Space Agency's latest mission will help.
article_snippet.sent: The European Space Agency's latest mission is working with Nasato send a lander crashing into a small asteroid's moon at 14,000mph to see what happens .
article_snippet.sent: The European Space Agency's latest mission will take place in two parts, and this month marked the start of preliminary design work on ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission, or AIM.
article_snippet.sent: Intended to demonstrate technologies for future deep-space missions, AIM will also be The European Space Agency's's very first investigation of planetary defence techniques.
article_snippet.sent: AIM will also put down a lander – ESA's first touchdown on a small body since Rosetta's Philae landed on a comet last November.
article_snippet.sent: AIM's findings will be returned by high-capacity laser link to ESA's Optical Ground Station on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. '
article_snippet.sent: AIM is also Europe's contribution to the larger Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission: AIDA.
article_snippet.sent: The target for the international Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission, of which ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is a part.
article_snippet.sent: AIM and AIDA will be discussed at this month's International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference, hosted at ESA's ESRIN Earth observation centre in Frascati, Italy, which will be devoted to assessing the risk of impacts from asteroid and comets and envisaging possible responses.
article_snippet.sent: This year's event features a simulated asteroid threat exercise, to which representatives of global space agencies and disaster response organisations will coordinate representatives of global space agencies and disaster response organisations reactions.