ESA's Hera spacecraft, on its way to asteroid Dimorphos, has provided breathtaking images of Earth and the Moon during its Near-Earth Commissioning Phase. The images showcase the spacecraft's capabilities and offer a unique perspective of our planet and its celestial neighbor.
Testing the equipment on an interstellar mission is one of the first things operators do when the spacecraft successfully launches. In some cases, those tests show the future troubles the mission will face, such as what happened to NASA’s Lucy mission a few years ago. However, in some cases, the mission provides us with perspectives we might never have seen before, which was the case for Hera , ESA ’s mission to Dimorphos . This asteroid was deflected successfully during NASA’s DART test in 2022.
Hera was successfully launched on October 7th and carries a series of instruments designed to peer at the asteroids using different wavelengths. Some instruments were turned toward the Earth and Moon from about a million km away as part of the mission’s Near-Earth Commissioning Phase. The resulting pictures showcase the spacecraft’s capabilities and provide a new perspective of our “terraqueous globe,” as Carl Sagan once put it, and our much more sterile neighbor.
First, we have an image from the Asteroid Framing Camera or AFC. Technically comprised of two cameras , this monochrome 1020×1020 image is the clearest of the three released by ESA as part of a press release. It gives a sense of the scale of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, which can be hard to judge when down on the planet’s surface.Next up is the Thermal Infrared Imager, or TIRI. This one was taken slightly closer, at 1.4 million kilometers away .
Hera ESA Asteroid Dimorphos DART Earth Moon Spacecraft Images
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