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ARCHIVE CONTENT
30 JUN. 2023
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The team working on ESA’s Hera asteroid mission has glimpsed its destination. Last September NASA’s DART mission returned images of the boulder-strewn Dimorphos moonlet just before impacting it, in an audacious and ultimately successful attempt to shift its orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos.
Following on from DART, Hera will carry with it a pair of shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ that conclude their own observations by landing on Dimorphos. Team members have been using DART images to help visualise this process of touchdown. And in the process they can't help but imagine: what would it be like for human explorers to one day follow in these CubeSats’ footsteps?
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Hera, her CubeSats, and their rocky target
Designing for ultra-low gravity
The CubeSat deployment has been designed around the fundamental fact that Dimorphos’s gravity levels are less than a millionth of Earth’s. So the pair will be released from Hera at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk escaping the asteroid’s feeble gravity and being lost in space. The MINERVA lander of Japan’s Hayabusa mission was lost in a similar manner when it was deployed in the wrong direction, as it attempted to land on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005.
Accordingly, any human astronaut would probably either use spikes and crampons to anchor themselves onto the surface, or else a thruster unit to glide over the surface – like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.
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Hypothetical human mission to an asteroid
Designing for ultra-low gravity
The CubeSat deployment has been designed around the fundamental fact that Dimorphos’s gravity levels are less than a millionth of Earth’s. So the pair will be released from Hera at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk escaping the asteroid’s feeble gravity and being lost in space. The MINERVA lander of Japan’s Hayabusa mission was lost in a similar manner when it was deployed in the wrong direction, as it attempted to land on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005.
Accordingly, any human astronaut would probably either use spikes and crampons to anchor themselves onto the surface, or else a thruster unit to glide over the surface – like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.
Media modal
NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe touches Bennu asteroid
Designing for ultra-low gravity
The CubeSat deployment has been designed around the fundamental fact that Dimorphos’s gravity levels are less than a millionth of Earth’s. So the pair will be released from Hera at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk escaping the asteroid’s feeble gravity and being lost in space. The MINERVA lander of Japan’s Hayabusa mission was lost in a similar manner when it was deployed in the wrong direction, as it attempted to land on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005.
Accordingly, any human astronaut would probably either use spikes and crampons to anchor themselves onto the surface, or else a thruster unit to glide over the surface – like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.
Media modal
How DART impacted Dimorphos
Designing for ultra-low gravity
The CubeSat deployment has been designed around the fundamental fact that Dimorphos’s gravity levels are less than a millionth of Earth’s. So the pair will be released from Hera at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk escaping the asteroid’s feeble gravity and being lost in space. The MINERVA lander of Japan’s Hayabusa mission was lost in a similar manner when it was deployed in the wrong direction, as it attempted to land on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005.
Accordingly, any human astronaut would probably either use spikes and crampons to anchor themselves onto the surface, or else a thruster unit to glide over the surface – like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.
Media modal
Milani studies asteroid dust
Designing for ultra-low gravity
The CubeSat deployment has been designed around the fundamental fact that Dimorphos’s gravity levels are less than a millionth of Earth’s. So the pair will be released from Hera at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk escaping the asteroid’s feeble gravity and being lost in space. The MINERVA lander of Japan’s Hayabusa mission was lost in a similar manner when it was deployed in the wrong direction, as it attempted to land on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005.
Accordingly, any human astronaut would probably either use spikes and crampons to anchor themselves onto the surface, or else a thruster unit to glide over the surface – like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.
Media modal
Juventas lands on Dimorphos
Designing for ultra-low gravity
The CubeSat deployment has been designed around the fundamental fact that Dimorphos’s gravity levels are less than a millionth of Earth’s. So the pair will be released from Hera at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk escaping the asteroid’s feeble gravity and being lost in space. The MINERVA lander of Japan’s Hayabusa mission was lost in a similar manner when it was deployed in the wrong direction, as it attempted to land on the Itokawa asteroid in 2005.
Accordingly, any human astronaut would probably either use spikes and crampons to anchor themselves onto the surface, or else a thruster unit to glide over the surface – like a scuba diver exploring a coral reef.
Media modal
ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano imagines human voyages to an asteroid
Today is Asteroid Day! Find out more about the fascinating asteroids populating our Solar System, the space missions seeking to explore them and the ways Earth is being safeguarded from impact threats in today's webcast for this annual UN-sanctioned global awareness campaign.
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