Hera Has Arrived: The First Close-Up of the Asteroid Humans Moved
After two years of flight, a flyby of Mars and a series of careful braking manoeuvres, a European spacecraft has finally arrived at its destination — the one place in the Solar System where humans deliberately knocked an asteroid off its course.
On 5 November 2026, the European Space Agency announced that its Hera spacecraft had reached the Didymos binary asteroid system, about 196.8 million kilometres from Earth, and sent back its first close-range science image. Taken from about 60 kilometres away by Hera's Asteroid Framing Camera, it shows the face of the 780-metre-wide asteroid Didymos that no camera had ever seen — a rugged, boulder-strewn hemisphere — with its small moonlet Dimorphos visible at the lower left, partly in shadow.
The other side of the story
Until now, every close view of Didymos came from NASA's DART spacecraft, which photographed only one hemisphere during its final approach in September 2022. Hera's image shows the other side. "This is the other side of Didymos from the one that DART's camera showed us shortly before impact," said Hera principal investigator Patrick Michel, of CNRS and the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in France.
That matters, because the new view immediately raised a question: does the surface look more battered than expected, with debris flung off Dimorphos during the 2022 impact reshaping its larger companion? After the impact, the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that at least 37 boulders, between 1 and 6.7 metres across, had been thrown off Dimorphos. A 2025 study modelled where those boulders would go and found most would fall back onto one of the two asteroids. Hera is now in place to check.
A two-year journey to a crime scene
Hera launched on 7 October 2024 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It flew past Mars in March 2025, then spent October 2026 slowing down: two braking manoeuvres a week apart cut its speed relative to the asteroids to just 20 metres per second, and smaller manoeuvres this week brought it to a near-standstill beside its targets. Signals now take about 11 minutes to travel each way between the spacecraft and Earth.
The mission is the second half of the first planetary defence experiment in history. The first half was DART: on 26 September 2022, NASA's spacecraft flew into Dimorphos at about 6.1 kilometres per second and shortened the moonlet's orbit around Didymos by 33 minutes — from 11 hours 55 minutes to 11 hours 23 minutes. Hera is the detective that follows. It will measure the mass of Dimorphos, study its interior, examine the impact site and work out exactly what the collision did to the moonlet's shape. ESA has called it a "crime scene investigation" — and the first detailed, full-resolution images of both asteroids will be released publicly on 25 November 2026.
Hera's work at Didymos is planned to run at least until June 2027, with a possible extension ending in a final descent towards the asteroid. It will also release two small CubeSats, Juventas and Milani, to gather extra data.
For students, this is science as detective work: one spacecraft caused a crash, another arrives years later to measure what changed, and a single photograph of a side nobody had seen becomes the first clue.
If your child looks up at the night sky and wonders how we could ever move an asteroid, a first lesson in physics or astronomy can take them from gravity and orbits to the missions testing planetary defence for real. Book your first lesson
Sources:
- European Space Agency, "Hera's first close-up of the Didymos binary asteroid system", 5 November 2026, as reported by EarthSky: https://earthsky.org/space/hera-mission-dart-asteroid-impact/
- starlust.org, "ESA releases Hera's first close-up image of Didymos-Dimorphos asteroid system", 6 November 2026: https://starlust.org/esa-releases-heras-first-close-up-image-of-dart-targets-didymos-and-dimorphos/
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