Preparing Hera’s High Gain Antenna for electromagnetic compatibility testing in ESA’s Maxwell chamber, during its pre-flight test campaign at
ESA’s Test Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. To the right is seen Hera’s ‘Asteroid Deck’, hosting its instruments, including its twin CubeSat Deep Space Deployers and two white-covered Asteroid Framing Cameras, bottom, with its black-wrapped Thermal Infrared Instrument in between the pair.
Hera is ESA’s first mission for planetary defence. Due for launch in October 2024, Hera will fly to the Didymos binary asteroid system in deep space to perform a close-up survey of the Dimorphos moonlet in orbit around the primary body. The Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos is already historic, as the first Solar System object to have its orbit changed by human activity, by
the 2022 impact of NASA’s DART mission.
Hera is intended to gather crucial missing data about Dimorphos for scientists, to turn DART’s grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique. To increase its yield of data, Hera carries with it ESA’s first deep space CubeSats, carrying additional instruments and planned to fly closer to the asteroid’s surface than the main spacecraft, before eventually landing.
Part of Hera’s testing was documented for the spacecraft team by photographer Max Alexander, who specialises in science communication through photography.
Credits: Max Alexander/ESA
