The ESA Hera Mission to the binary Asteroid (65803) Didymos: one Year after Launch

Kurzfassung

The Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) was launched successfully on October 7, 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center of Cape Canaveral with a Falcon 9 from the Space X company. After a commissioning phase and images of the Earth and its Moon with the three kinds of imagers onboard the spacecraft, namely the Asteroid Framing Camera (AFC), the Hyperspectral Imager (Hyperscout-H) and the Thermal Infrared Imager (TIRI), as well as a deep space maneuver, Hera was put in a trajectory towards Mars. On March 12, it performed a Mars flyby during which images of the red planet and of its second Moon Deimos were taken by the three instruments. The rendezvous with the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos will occur in the fall of 2026 and investigations of the system will be performed during 6 months. The mission will answer the remaining questions left after all NASA DART data were analyzed, offering both a full documentation of the first asteroid deflection test performed by DART and a full characterization of the binary system, including measurements that were not performed yet by any asteroid missions. Hera is the first mission that includes a main spacecraft and two cubesats for deep space exploration of an asteroid, with the three components operating at the same time in a binary system, and finally landing on one or the two binary components. With its only four years of development, from industrial contract to launch, Hera paves the way to future fast asteroid mission implementations, such as RAMSES to Apophis, contributing to the necessity to be able to develop fast reconnaissance mission in the framework of planetary defense.