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Photo credit: ESA Science Office
The Hera asteroid probe has reached a crucial milestone in its journey to investigate the site of the first asteroid deflection test.
The European Space Agency (ESA) fired its three orbital control engines for 13 minutes on November 6, following a longer, 100-minute burn on October 23, the agency announced in a statement on November 8.
Together, the maneuvers accelerated Hera by 544 feet per second (166 meters per second) and put the spacecraft on course for rendezvous Mars in March 2025. It will use the Red Planet as gravity support and accelerate Hera toward its destination.
The Hera mission is aimed at the binary asteroid system Didymos. NASA Double asteroid redirection mission (DART) crashed into Didymos’ smaller companion Dimorphos in September 2022, and Hera must conduct important follow-up studies to find out how efficient the asteroid deflection impact really was.
“We are now analyzing Hera’s new trajectory after the second burn,” Francesco Castellini from ESOC’s Flight Dynamics team said in the ESA statement. “It seems to have gone very well. We will perform a much smaller correction maneuver of tens of centimeters on November 21 to refine the trajectory for the upcoming Mars flyby.”
The flyby will also be an opportune moment for some additional scientific discovery. Hera’s flight path will allow a flyby Deimos and will train its science payloads on Mars’ mysterious moon.
A cube-shaped spacecraft with two wing-like solar panels orbits above a reddish-orange planet
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Hera started on October 7th on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The spacecraft carries two cubesats named Milani and Juventas and is scheduled to arrive in the Didymos system in late 2026.
Earlier this week, ESA released images showing how Hera is evolving increasingly distant from the earth and the moon.
