MIAMI: Europe’s Hera probe successfully launched Monday on a mission to inspect the damage done by a NASA spacecraft that smashed into an asteroid during the first test of Earth’s planetary defences.

Despite fears that an approaching hurricane could delay the launch, the probe blasted off on a SpaceX rocket into cloudy skies from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida just before 11:00 am local time (1500 GMT).

Hera’s mission is to investigate the aftermath of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which deliberately crashed into the Dimorphos asteroid in 2022 roughly 11 million kilometres (6.8 million miles) from Earth.

The fridge-sized DART spacecraft successfully knocked the asteroid well off course, demonstrating that humanity may no longer be powerless against potentially planet-killing asteroids that could head our way.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said that Hera will conduct what it has dubbed a “crime scene investigation”.