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ESA's Hera spacecraft, launched in October 2024 to study the aftermath of NASA's DART asteroid-deflection test, is on track to arrive at the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system in late 2026, a month earlier than originally planned.

Which NASA mission's impact site is ESA's Hera spacecraft traveling to investigate?

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test)
DART deliberately crashed into the moonlet Dimorphos in 2022 to test whether a kinetic impact could shift an asteroid's orbit, and Hera is returning to measure the crater and the moonlet's mass in detail. Hera carries two shoebox-sized CubeSats, Milani and Juventas, which will separate to perform their own close-up surveys of the asteroid pair.

Hera is heading to Dimorphos precisely because that tiny moonlet is where NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed in 2022, the first real-world test of deflecting an asteroid by simply slamming a probe into it at high speed. The impact measurably shortened Dimorphos's orbit around its larger companion Didymos, proving the kinetic-impactor concept works, but ground telescopes could only estimate the crater size and the moonlet's new mass and shape from a distance. Hera's job is to fly up close and measure those details precisely.

OSIRIS-REx was a sample-return mission to the asteroid Bennu, unrelated to DART or planetary defense testing, while Lucy is touring Jupiter's Trojan asteroids to study leftover building blocks from the early solar system. Neither mission involved an intentional impact, so neither has a crash site for Hera to revisit.

Hera carries two toaster-sized CubeSats, Milani and Juventas, which will detach and fly even closer to the asteroid pair than the mothership dares, one mapping surface minerals and the other using radar to probe what Dimorphos is made of on the inside.

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