One week earlier than ESA’s Hera asteroid mission launch window opens, this group shot reveals ESA and OHB staff members performing closing spacecraft checks (look intently for the mission’s dinosaur mascot as effectively).

The photograph was taken contained in the North Integration Cell of the SpaceX Payload Processing Facility, positioned at Cape Canaveral House Power Station in Florida. Simply seen within the background, with purple tags positioned on its nook thrusters, Hera has now been stuffed with propellant and as a subsequent step awaits encapsulation inside its launcher fairing.

Resulting from be launched on a House Falcon 9, Hera is ESA’s first planetary defence mission, heading to a singular goal among the many 1.3 million identified asteroids of our Photo voltaic System.

If an incoming asteroid had been to threaten Earth, what may folks do about it? On 26 September 2022 NASA’s DART mission carried out humankind’s first check of asteroid deflection by crashing into the Nice-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos moonlet. The consequence was a shift in its orbit across the mountain-sized Didymos foremost asteroid.

Subsequent comes ESA’s personal contribution to this worldwide collaboration: the Hera mission will revisit Dimorphos to assemble important close-up information in regards to the deflected physique, to show DART’s grand-scale experiment right into a well-understood and doubtlessly repeatable planetary defence method.

The mission will even carry out essentially the most detailed exploration but of a binary asteroid system – though binaries make up 15% of all identified asteroids, they’ve by no means been surveyed intimately. Hera will even carry out expertise demonstration experiments, together with the deployment ESA’s first deep area ‘CubeSats’ – shoebox-sized spacecraft to enterprise nearer than the principle mission then ultimately land – and an bold check of ‘self-driving’ for the principle spacecraft, primarily based on vision-based navigation.