ESA's Hera mission

"Are we there yet?"🛰️ 🪨

"NEARLY!"

📽️Watch the latest episode of our animated Incredible Adventure of Hera series: The Space Detectives Arrive!
esa.int/ESA_Multimedia…

Spot the hidden asteroid! One half of the Didymos binary system is front & centre in this new image from ESA's Hera mission for planetary defence, taken from 56 km away - but can you see the other half, asteroid Dimorphos?
esa.int/articles/about…

ESA's Hera mission for planetary defence has begun surveying its target asteroids from 30-25 km away, flying in 'rectangular orbits' around the ultra-low-gravity Didymos and Dimorphos bodies 🛰️🪨🪨esa.int/articles/hera-…

Our Hera spacecraft includes this infrared TIRI instrument supplied by ISAS/JAXA, acquiring heat maps of the Didymos asteroids, which in turn offers valuable insights into their underlying material properties

Han Solo was wrong! The trick to flying a spaceship around asteroids is going *really* slowly…
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ESA’s newly-arrived Hera mission is moving at just 12 cm/s around the Didymos binary asteroids, about as rapid as a fast-crawling insect!