Taken before ESA’s Hera asteroid mission left the Agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands for its launch site in Cape Canaveral, this photo shows the view from the top ‘Asteroid Deck’ of the cube-shaped spacecraft, where its instruments are mounted.
In space the spacecraft will tilt itself so that its Asteroid Deck faces forward while operating its instruments – employed both for navigation purposes and scientific study.
Hera’s two CubeSats – the Milani mineral prospector and Juventas radar observer – will also be deployed from here once the spacecraft reaches the Didymos binary asteroid.
To the left can be seen the open door of Deep Space Deployer and to the right can be seen the Juventas CubeSat part-deployed from its own Deep Space Deployer.
Jutting from the Asteroid Deck, wrapped in black multi-layer insulation, is the Laser Rangefinder, which will determine the distance to the asteroid surface by bouncing back laser beam pulses and measuring their time of flight.
Towards the back of the Asteroid Deck, protruding at shallow angles from the Deck are twin startrackers used to track the spacecraft orientation.
Once Hera reaches space this will become a familiar angle on the mission, because this photo was taken from the point of view of the Spacecraft Monitoring Camera, a compact camera 4 mpixel imager that will be used in particular to observe the deployment of Hera’s two CubeSats. In this image the SMC can be glimpsed as the red-capped object in the foreground.
For more information on the layout of the Asteroid Deck, click here.