Journey to Didymos Asteroid System: A Year Later | Europe's Hera Mission
What a difference a year makes! Today Hera’s asteroid mission for planetary defense is cruising through deep space on the far side of the Sun, headed to its final destination: the Didymos binary asteroid system. However, a year ago, on October 7, 2024, it was uncertain if the mission was ever going to take off at all.
Its launcher was grounded due to a launch anomaly and Hurricane Milton was closing on Cape Canaveral! The mission needed to lift off then and there because it had to perform a flyby of Mars to speed it on its way to Didymos. Any delay would add years to its travel time. Thankfully, Hera received permission for launch and the heavens cleared just half an hour before launch. Liftoff happened to plan—the team had their mission in space!
Since then Hera has been testing out the ‘self-driving’ technology it will use around the asteroids on Earth and the Moon. It performed its flyby of Mars and imaged its very first asteroid from three million kilometers, proving the capability of its main Asteroid Framing Camera. Next, Hera is heading for aphelion, its furthest distance from the Sun. It will reach Didymos in autumn 2026, where it will begin its mission to find out what happened to the smaller asteroid after NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted it in September 2022.
The Hera spacecraft will revisit the Dimorphos asteroid to gather vital close-up data about the deflected body after NASA's DART Mission performed a grand-scale experiment by applying a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defense technique.
On September 26, 2022, moving at 6.1 km/s, NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into the Dimorphos asteroid. Part of our Solar System changed. The impact shrunk the orbit of the Great Pyramid-sized Dimorphos around its parent asteroid, the mountain-sized Didymos.
The Hera Mission will also perform the most detailed exploration yet of a binary asteroid system—although binaries make up 15% of all known asteroids, one has never been surveyed in detail.
Learn more about the Hera Mission:
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera
Duration: 8 minutes
Release Date: Oct. 7, 2025
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