Hera will study the asteroids in detail following the DART mission.
Hera won funding at the ESA ministerial meeting in late 2019, allowing its development to proceed.
Milani is another cubesat that will study the surfaces and composition of Didymos and Dimorphos before attempting to land on Hera.
Juventas is a cubesat flying with Hera, equipped with a radar designed to map the interior of Dimorphos.
Hera is equipped with 12 instruments designed to gather data on Didymos and Dimorphos.
Germany was the largest single contributor to the Hera mission and has strong public interest in it.
ESA regrouped and proposed Hera after the failure to secure funding for the Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) at a 2016 ministerial meeting.
The 12 newly selected Hera participating scientists include Masatoshi Hirabayashi from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Tim Lister from Las Cumbres Observatory.
Hera, which launched on October 7, is deploying ESA’s first deep-space cubesats to visit the Didymos asteroid system.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster used for the Hera launch completed its 23rd and final flight.
NASA selected 12 participating scientists to join the Hera mission as part of the Hera Participating Scientist Program.
The launch forecast called for a temperature of 75°F, moderate rain, 100% cloud cover, a wind speed of 16 mph, and 2.56 in of rain at the time of the planned Hera launch.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster that flew Hera previously launched Crew-1, Crew-2, SXM-8, CRS-23, IXPE, Transporter-4, Transporter-5, Globalstar FM15, ISI EROS C-3, Korea 425, Maxar 1, ASBM, and 10 Starlink missions.
The 12 newly selected Hera participating scientists include Timothy Titus from the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona and Yun Zhang from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
SpaceX launched the ESA Hera mission to interplanetary transfer orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Monday, 2024-10-07.
Redwire Corporation is providing an onboard computer system for the European Space Agency’s Hera mission.
Hera will be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center in October 2024.
ESA’s Hera mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024 to visit the asteroid Didymos.
The Juventas nanosatellite was partly developed in Luxembourg by GomSpace and is currently in testing to be part of the HERA mission programmed for October 2024.
In the coming weeks, ESA will launch its EarthCARE spacecraft on a Falcon 9 and its Hera asteroid mission this fall on another Falcon 9.