11 LIS. 2026
Datum vydání
94
Zobrazení
The European Space Agency’s Hera mission for planetary defence has arrived at its target asteroids. Positioned just 30-25 km away from the binary Didymos system, the small-car-sized spacecraft has commenced its ‘early characterisation phase’ to gather key data on the asteroid pair.
“Our aim right now is to gather the big-picture findings of relevance to supporting the mission’s planetary defence goals,” explains mission scientist Michael Kueppers.
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“During this phase our images will reveal for the first time what a small asteroid looks like globally, having experienced a hypervelocity impact in the context of the first asteroid deflection test, when NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted it to change its orbit in 2022.
“Previous predictions by our impact models suggested many different ways the asteroid body might react, but Hera will reveal which forecast was the correct one – if any!”
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Flying around an asteroid – or in this case a pair of asteroids – is very different from the way a traditional planetary mission operates.
The main 780-m-diameter Didymos body has gravity about 40 000 times weaker than Earth's, while the 151-m-diameter Dimorphos moonlet orbiting around it has about 200 000 times weaker gravity than Earth’s.
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In such a low gravity environment, going into a traditional circular orbit is impractical. Instead Hera flies around the common centre of gravity of the two bodies at a typical velocity of just 12 cm/s – about as fast as a rapidly-crawling insect.
And the spacecraft is moving in nearly straight rather than circular lines around the asteroids. On a cycle of every three days followed by four days, as it moves away from the asteroids, Hera performs thruster firings to shift its course by 90 degrees. The result is that Hera ends up tracing a series of ‘rectangular orbits’ around Didymos and Dimorphos to maintain its approximately 30-25 km distance from the asteroid pair.
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This formation – derived from the experience of flying ESA’s Rosetta comet mission – is inherently safe because if any individual thruster firing fails the spacecraft simply drifts away from the asteroids rather than risking collision. And because the velocities involved are so low, it only uses up a tiny amount of propellant for each individual manoeuvre.
Next month Hera is scheduled to move closer to the asteroids for the start of its ‘detailed characterisation phase’. This involves a shift to more complex bowtie-shaped hyperbolic arcs starting from around 20 km away.
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Hera is being controlled from ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany. The flight control team connect with the spacecraft for about eight hours a day across 196.5 million km of space, via a quartet of 35-m-diameter Deep Space Antennas located in Argentina, Spain and Australia.
Hera’s flight controllers are supported in turn by ESA’s Flight Dynamics team, who employ mission telemetry to determine the spacecraft’s precise position in space relative to the asteroids and come up with the telecommands needed to shift the spacecraft to its next planned location.
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Hera for planetary defence
On 26 September 2022 Dimorphos became the subject of a grand-scale planetary defence experiment when NASA’s 580-kg DART spacecraft impacted the smaller asteroid at a velocity of 6.1 km/s. The resulting collision sent out a plume of debris across 10 000 km of space while also slowing the asteroid’s orbit by around 33 minutes.
But key unknowns remain to turn this ‘kinetic impact’ method into a well-understood planetary defence technique: what did the impact do to the asteroid itself? Did it leave a crater, or reshape the asteroid body entirely? What is the precise makeup, structure and mass of Dimorphos – and which properties explain a deflection so much greater than impact simulations predicted?
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Over the coming months Hera will perform a close-up ‘crash site investigation’ of Dimorphos, harnessing multiple instruments and deploying a pair of shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ for a still closer survey, eventually progressing to landing.
Meet the Hera Space Companion
Do you have questions about Hera’s journey? Ask the Hera Space Companion: not just an AI chatbot but a dynamic mission-linked communication platform, designed to make the European Space Agency’s first planetary defence mission accessible to everyone!
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10 asteroid mysteries that Hera will explore
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