The ESA's Hera spacecraft readies itself for the unknown by training for alien terrain with autonomous precision before its planetary defense mission.
The ESA Hera spacecraft’s mission depends on successful testing of the scraft’s navigatation system for the ultra low-gravity binary asteroid system. ESA ’s Hera spacecraft, tasked with planetary defense, is undergoing rigorous pre-flight testing as it prepares for its upcoming mission to navigate a binary asteroid system comprised of the mountain-sized Didymos and smaller Dimorphos, made famous by NASA’s DART mission last year.
At the headquarters of GMV, the developer of the GNC system in Madrid, a replica of Hera’s On-Board Computer is being tested by conducting proximity operations around a model asteroid using a camera for realism. Similarly, in Bremen at the premises of spacecraft manufacturer OHB, tests are being conducted using a full-scale hardware replica of Hera known as the Hera Avionics Test Bench.
“This phase will end at asteroid arrival when camera images will be used to distinguish the asteroid from background stars by spotting its gradual motion across successive images,” Fernandez said. “GNC for the follow-on proximity operations phase is what we are concentrating on now, involving the spacecraft initially coming as close as 30 km from the asteroid pair, then much closer later on, down to 1 km.
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