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\t\t\t\t\t\t25\/04\/2024<\/span> ESA\u2019s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence will make a swingby of Mars next March, borrowing speed to help reach its target Didymos binary asteroid system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the process the spacecraft will venture as near as 6 000 km from the surface of the Red Planet, closer than the orbits of the two Martian moons. Its trajectory will be tweaked so that it can train its science instruments onto Mars\u2019s smaller moon Deimos from within 1 000 km away, while also observing Mars itself.<\/p>\n Details of the swingby are being presented at this week\u2019s Hera Science Community Workshop\u00a0at ESA\u2019s ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cThis swingby is part of the scheduled manoeuvres to get Hera to Didymos by the end of its two-year cruise phase,\u201d explains Michael Kueppers, ESA\u2019s Hera project scientist.<\/p>\n \u201cBy swinging through the gravitational field of Mars in its direction of movement the spacecraft gains added velocity for its onward journey. This close encounter is not part of Hera\u2019s core mission, but we will have several of our science instruments activated anyway. It gives us another chance to calibrate our instruments and potentially to make some scientific discoveries.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Flight Dynamics engineer Pablo Mu\u00f1oz is part of the Mission Analysis team at ESA\u2019s European Space Operations Centre in Germany which calculated the trajectory: \u201cIt\u00b4s truly fortunate that Mars happens to be at the right location and at the right time to give Hera a hand. This enabled us to design a trajectory that uses the gravity of Mars to push Hera towards its rendezvous with Didymos, resulting in great fuel savings for the mission. Part of the excess propellant can then be spent in advancing the arrival at the binary asteroid by a few months, thus maximising the mission\u2019s planetary defence and science return.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Hera is due for launch in October this year, headed for the mountain-sized Didymos asteroid and the Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos moonlet that orbits around it.\u00a0On 26 September 2022 NASA\u2019s van-sized DART spacecraft impacted the Dimorphos asteroid at around 6.1 km\/s. This first test of the \u2018kinetic impact\u2019 method of planetary defence succeeded in modifying the orbit of the target asteroid around its larger parent.<\/p>\n Next Hera will perform a close-up survey of Dimorphos, to gather crucial missing information on the asteroid\u2019s mass, makeup and structure that can turn DART\u2019s grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cHera\u2019s instruments have been designed to observe Dimorphos of course, but the potential is there to turn up interesting insights about the distinctively asteroid-like Deimos as well,\u201d notes Patrick Michel Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la C\u00f4te d’Azur in Nice and Hera\u2019s Principal Investigator.<\/p>\n Orbiting 23 460 km from Mars, Deimos \u2013 its name deriving from the Greek for \u2018Fear\u2019 \u2013 is the further and smaller of the two Martian moons. The lumpy body has a diameter of 12.4 km across and has a dark surface reminiscent of C-type asteroids. One theory is that both Deimos and its fellow Martian moon Phobos are in fact captured asteroids from the main Asteroid belt. Their surface characteristics have features in common with the planet below them however, conversely suggesting an impact-based origin.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cDeimos has not been observed before with Hera\u2019s combination of science instruments, so hope to make some discoveries,\u201d adds Patrick Michel. \u201cWe will also be observing in synergy with the Emirates Mars Mission \u2018Hope Probe\u2019, which launched in July 2020 and entered orbit around Mars in February 2021. Co-observations with ESA\u2019s own Mars Express\u00a0and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter\u00a0missions are also under consideration.<\/p>\n \u201cAdditionally, the imagery and data we gather will help with planning the Japanese-led Martian Moons eXploration mission, MMX, which is due to launch in 2026. MMX will survey both moons while also landing a small French-German rover on Phobos and acquiring samples to return to Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Hera will employ three of its instruments during its swingby of Mars and Deimos. Its main Asteroid Framing Camera will gather visual imagery while its HyperScout-H instrument will observe in a range of colours beyond the limits of the human eye, gathering mineralogical data in a total of 45 visible and near-infrared spectral bands. Finally its Thermal Infrared Imager is a heat mapper, able to make out features through local night-time and measure how surface temperatures change over time to help constrain surface properties.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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