Tiniest Mars moon Deimos spotted by Europe's asteroid-chasing spacecraft
Europe's Hera spacecraft flew by Mars this week on its way to catch up with an asteroid and tested out its cameras on the Red Planet's tiniest moon.
The European Space Agency's Hera mission was launched in October 2024 to check the homework of Nasa's DART mission. In 2022, DART intentionally smashed into an asteroid named Dimorphos during a planetary defense test. According to NASA, DART's impact changed Dimorphos' orbit around its parent asteroid, Didymos, by 32 minutes.
On Wednesday, during a Mars gravity assist, Hera used its trio of instruments to hone in on Mars and one of its small moons – the first object photographed by its cameras beyond Earth.
The ESA said Hera took the photographs of Deimos from just 620 miles away, capturing the less-visible side of the tidally-locked moon. Deimos measures just over 7 miles across. Scientists believe Deimos could be a leftover chunk from Mars or a gravitationally captured asteroid, according to the ESA.
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"These instruments have been tried out before, during Hera's departure from Earth, but this is the first time that we have employed them on a small distant moon for which we still lack knowledge – demonstrating their excellent performance in the process," ESA's Hera mission scientist Michael Kueppers said in an ESA blog.
However, Hera's target of study is much smaller than the little 7-mile moon of Mars.
The binary asteroid pair is measured in feet instead of miles. The spacecraft will visit the asteroid Didymos, which is about 2,500 feet across, and its moonlit Dimorphos, which is about 500 feet across.
The Mars flyby set up Hera for a follow-up maneuver in February 2026 and then a December 2026 arrival at Didymos.Original article source: Tiniest Mars moon Deimos spotted by Europe's asteroid-chasing spacecraft
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