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Cubesats on the phone for European asteroid Hera mission after October 7 launch

Umito October 30, 2024

Two European cubesats announced they were OK as they rushed to a binary asteroid system to check the damage inflicted by NASA’s DART impactor in 2022.

DARTthe double asteroid redirection test, proved to be an unqualified success when it was slammed in the 560-foot-wide (170-meter) asteroid Dimorphos, change its orbit around the largest space rock Didymos and prove for the first time that humans have the ability to push potentially dangerous objects asteroids away.

From now on, the European Space Agency (ESA) Hera mission, which launched October 7is on his way to survey the damage and learn more about the Didymos-Dimorphos system. Riding with Hera are two little ones cubesatsnamed Juventas and Milani. The shoebox-sized craft are hidden in small “garages” aboard Hera called Deep Space Deployers, and they will be released in late 2026 when Hera arrives at the binary system.

But first, European scientists had to verify that Juventas and Milani had survived the rock and roll of the launch.

“Each cubesat was activated for about an hour in turn, in live sessions with the ground to perform commissioning – what we call ‘Are you alive?’ and ‘docked box’ tests,” said Franco Perez Lissi, engineer of ESA’s Hera cubesats, in a statement.

Juventas, which will carry out a radar survey of the interior of Dimorphos, was turned on by radio command on October 17, when Hera was 4 million kilometers from Earth. Milani, which will search for minerals on the asteroid’s surface to help determine its composition, was activated on October 24, when Hera was 4.9 million miles (7.9 million kilometers) away and moved away every minute.

“We were able to activate all of the onboard systems in turn, including their platform avionics, instruments and inter-satellite links that they will use to talk to Hera, as well as spin their reaction wheels, which will be used for attitude control,” Lissi said.

Everything went perfectly well with both cubesats, and the plan is to turn them on every couple of months during their trip to make sure they stay healthy.

The reason they team up with Hera is because they will take more risks to get closer to Dimorphos than Hera can. If one of them hits debris still present during the DART impact, or crashes onto the surface by misjudging the gravitational environment of the Didymos-Dimorphos system, it will not be the end of the world. If Hera were to suffer an accident by taking too many risks, it would mean the end of the mission. Hence the need for cubesats.

Juventas was built and supplied for the Hera mission by a Luxembourg company called GOMspace, while Milani is the product of Italian company Tyvak International. Both companies will remain involved in the operation of the two cubesats as they explore Dimorphos.

“During this Cubesat commissioning, we not only confirmed that the Cubesat instruments and systems were functioning as intended, but we also validated the entire ground control infrastructure,” said Sylvain Lodiot , operations manager at Hera.

Data from the two cubesats is received by the Hera Mission Operations Center at ESA’s European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Germany, and by the Cubesat Mission Operations Center (CMOC) at the European Space Center space security and education in Redu, Belgium. The telemetry is then transmitted to the mission control centers at GOMspace and Tyvak International, where scientists will study it in real time and relay all commands through this channel.

“Verifying this arrangement is good preparation for the operational phase of free flight once Hera reaches Dimorphos,” Lodiot said.

Hera, Juventas and Milani don’t go to Didymos and Dimorphos just to admire the damage caused by DART. They will also carry out the first ever detailed scientific study of a binary asteroid system. Since up to 15% of all known asteroids are binary, it makes sense to learn as much as possible about them: how they form, what they are made of, and how dangerous they can be for them. Earth.

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Cubesats on the phone for European asteroid Hera mission after October 7 launch

Umito

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Cubesats on the phone for European asteroid Hera mission after October 7 launch

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