The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera spacecraft is now assembled ahead of its journey to investigate the asteroid smashed by NASA’s DART mission.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impacted Dimorphos, the smaller companion of the asteroid Didymos, in September 2022, creating debris and, crucially, altering the space rock’s orbit.
ESA is now preparing its contribution to the DART international planetary defense experiment, Hera, which is able to follow up on the aftermath. The 2 modules of the Hera spacecraft were recently mated on the facilities of the technology company OHB in Bremen, Germany, in a three-hour process.
“Previously we had these two modules; now you’ll be able to say the spacecraft has been born,” Paolo Martino, Hera system engineer, said in a statement.
“Next we will probably be adding some payload units to the spacecraft’s top deck, which we’re receiving directly from the manufacturers once Hera moves to its next stop,” Martino said.
Hera will probably be transported to ESA’s ESTEC Test Centre within the Netherlands. There it would undergo an environmental test campaign as a part of flight-readiness checks.
The spacecraft is ready to launch from Cape Canaveral in October 2024 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Hera will reach Dimorphos in late 2026, 4 years after DART slammed into the asteroid moonlet.
Hera was intended to witness and assess the DART impact in real time but was hit by delays. The LICIACube cubesat stepped in on short notice to supply initial post-impact observations as an alternative.
Hera will use a lidar (“light detection and ranging”) sensor, an optical camera and a composition-revealing thermal camera to survey the asteroid system. A pair of cubesats, named Juventas and Milani, will join Hera. The previous will carry a tiny radar payload to supply a glimpse inside Dimorphos, while Milani will make near-infrared observations of the 2 rocks’ surfaces.
While Hera has finally come together, space-based observations have shown the degree to which Dimorphos got here apart after NASA’s high-velocity intervention. Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, reveal that the kinetic impact unleashed a chaotic cloud of boulders.