The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft has taken its first close-up picture of the binary asteroid Didymos from about 60 kilometres away, ESA reports. Hera arrived after a two-year flight and is now nearly 197 million kilometres from Earth.
The image shows a side of the 780-metre-wide Didymos that NASA’s DART probe never saw, covered in boulders, craters and groove-like patterns. Some of that material may have been thrown off its small moon, Dimorphos, when DART deliberately crashed into it in 2022. That collision shortened the moonlet’s orbit by 33 minutes, far more than expected.
Hera’s job is to study the aftermath in detail so scientists fully understand how a spacecraft can shift an asteroid’s path. Sharper images of both bodies are due later this month.
Source: European Space Agency