ESA's Hera Mission for Asteroid Research
TapTechNews May 30 news, the European Space Agency (ESA) is conducting the final tests of the Hera mission, which is planned to be launched in October this year to investigate an asteroid that was deliberately crashed into by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2022. This mission aims to collect more accurate information about the impact and help develop a system for deflecting the orbit of asteroids and defending the earth.
The spacecraft of the Hera mission is currently undergoing pre-flight tests, and at the same time, the guidance navigation and control (GNC) system for orbiting the binary asteroid system Didymos and Dimorphos is also being tested. Spain and Germany are using replicas of Hera spacecraft components to verify the performance of the GNC system through virtual tests.
According to TapTechNews understanding, one of the main goals of the autonomous Hera mission is to assess the changes that occurred in the asteroid Dimorphos that was impacted by NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission, which will provide important references for the research and development of the planetary defense system. Performing this task is extremely challenging itself, because the gravitational field strength of this binary asteroid system is only a few tens of thousands of that of the earth, and autonomous navigation is extremely difficult. In addition, the impact of the DART probe changed the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos and may have significantly changed the overall shape of the asteroid.
Jesus Gil Fernandez, the ESA's guidance navigation and control engineer, said that currently the ESA is focusing on the guidance navigation and control system of the subsequent close-range operation stage of Hera, which can bring the detector closer to this binary asteroid system to within 1 kilometer. Similar to the technology behind self-driving cars, Hera's GNC system will use information from a variety of different data sources to ensure safe operation around Didymos.
If the Hera mission can be successfully launched in October this year, the detector will fly in space for two years and pass by Mars to gain additional speed and observe Mars' satellite Deimos before arriving at the Didymos binary asteroid system in October 2026.