Overview
Hera is ESA's first planetary defence mission that will perform a detailed post-impact survey of the target asteroid Dimorphos, the orbiting moonlet of a binary asteroid system known as Didymos. Following NASA's DART mission impact, Hera will turn the grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique. Demonstrating new technologies from autonomous navigation around an asteroid to low gravity proximity operations, Hera will be humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system and Europe's flagship Planetary Defender.
Specifications
Category: Research- Weight
- 1,214 kg
- Autonomy
- fully autonomous
- Launch year
- 2024
- Price
- $52,000,000
- Status
- active
Detailed specifications
Other16
- Price Tier
- 150K+
- Applications
- sample_handling,visual_inspection
- Sub Category
- deep-space asteroid probe
- Pricing Model
- purchase
- Model Variants
- Juventas,GRASS
- Company Country
- EU
- Navigation Type
- vision
- Deployment Count
- 2
- Deployment Notes
- Deploys two '6-unit-XL' CubeSats (Milani and Juventas) at a few centimetres per second into deep space for asteroid surveying[1][3][4][8]
- Compatible Vision
- main navigation cameras,thermal imager,multispectral imager,laser altimeter,low-frequency radar,gravimeter
- Industries Served
- space_research
- Training Required
- advanced_>5days
- Availability Status
- available
- Countries Available
- Germany,Belgium,Romania,Luxembourg,Sweden,Portugal,Spain,Czech Republic,Austria,Finland,Poland,Switzerland
- Extras Contact Emails
- contact@esa.int,info@esa.int,press@esa.int,partnerships@esa.int
- Additional Information
- Hera will help turn DART’s impact experiment into a well-understood and repeatable deflection technique – ready to be deployed if an asteroid should ever be spotted heading towards Earth.,In September 2020, ESA awarded a €129.4 million contract covering the detailed design, manufacturing and testing of Hera.,Hera will demonstrate novel technologies and deploy Europe’s first deep-space CubeSats to survey the asteroid close up.
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