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When ESA\u2019s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence touched down at its Florida launch site in its Antonov An-124 transporter, the mission\u2019s two shoebox-sized CubeSats travelled with it. This is the moment the Milani and Juventas CubeSats made it down to the ground on the morning of 3 September.<\/p>\n
The two CubeSats have since undergone functional testing \u2013 to check no damage was sustained from their travels \u2013 then been fuelled, and are now integrated into the main spacecraft, in readiness for a planned launch by SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in early October.<\/p>\n
Seen left is the Milani CubeSat in its container, produced for ESA by Tyvak International in Italy, with the Juventas CubeSat from GomSpace in Luxembourg to the right.<\/p>\n
The Milani\u00a0CubeSat hosts a multispectral imager to map surface mineralogy as well as a dust surveyor.\u00a0Juventas\u00a0carries a radar instrument, to perform the first radar probe of an asteroid\u2019s internal structure, along with a gravity-detecting gravimeter.<\/p>\n
The CubeSats have been stowed in their \u2018Deep Space Deployers\u2019 on Hera\u2019s top-side Asteroid Deck, which will stow them safely until they are ready to be deployed one at a time in the vicinity of the mission\u2019s target Didymos binary asteroid.<\/p>\n
About Hera<\/b><\/p>\n
Hera is ESA\u2019s first mission for planetary defence. Due for launch in October this year, Hera will fly to the Didymos binary asteroid system in deep space to perform a close-up survey of the Dimorphos moonlet in orbit around the primary body. The Great-Pyramid-sized Dimorphos is already historic, as the first Solar System object to have its orbit changed by human activity,\u00a0by the 2022 impact of NASA\u2019s DART mission.<\/p>\n
Hera is intended to gather crucial missing data about Dimorphos for scientists, to turn DART\u2019s grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique. To increase its yield of data, Hera carries with it ESA\u2019s first deep space CubeSats, carrying additional instruments and planned to fly closer to the asteroid\u2019s surface than the main spacecraft, before eventually landing.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n