ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence will make a swingby of Mars next March, borrowing...
ESA's 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.
Details of the swingby are being presented at this week's Hera Science Community Workshop at ESA's ESTEC technical centre in the Netherlands.
"This swingby is part of the scheduled manoeuvres to get Hera to Didymos by the end of its two-year cruise phase," explains Michael Kueppers, ESA's Hera project scientist.
Flight Dynamics engineer Pablo Muñoz is part of the Mission Analysis team at ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Germany which calculated the trajectory: "It´s 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's planetary defence and science return."
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.
Next Hera will perform a close-up survey of Dimorphos, to gather crucial missing information on the asteroid's mass, makeup and structure that can turn DART's grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique.
"Hera's 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," notes Patrick Michel Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in Nice and Hera's Principal Investigator.
One theory is that both Deimos and its fellow Martian moon Phobos are in fact captured asteroids from the main Asteroid belt.
"We will also be observing in synergy with the Emirates Mars Mission 'Hope Probe', which launched in July 2020 and entered orbit around Mars in February 2021. Co-observations with ESA's own Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter missions are also under consideration."
Hera will employ three of its instruments during its swingby of Mars and Deimos.