Heli Greus, Hera Product Assurance and Safety Manager at ESA, presents Hera and its instruments before the spacecraft left the Agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands. Her contribution to the mission is to make sure that whatever goes insite Hera will survive the space environment. To her, the biggest challenge was combining Hera with the CubeSats Juventas and Milani, which follow industrial rules and a ‘NewSpace’ approach.
Hera is ESA’s first planetary defence mission, heading to a unique target among the 1.3 million known asteroids of our Solar System. On 26 September 2022 NASA’s DART mission performed humankind’s first test of asteroid deflection by crashing into the Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos moonlet. The result was a shift in its orbit around the mountain-sized Didymos main asteroid.
Now comes ESA’s own contribution to this international collaboration: the Hera mission will revisit Dimorphos to gather vital close-up data about the deflected body.
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