The Hera<\/a> spacecraft made a flyby of Mars<\/a> one year ago, in March 2025, testing its autonomous vision-based navigation and training its cameras<\/a> on the Martian moon Deimos<\/a>, while also setting itself on course for the Didymos system.<\/p>\n Article continues below <\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n \n ESA’s Hera mission conducted a deep space maneuver in February\/March 2026 to align the inclination of the spacecraft\u2019s orbit around the sun with that of its destination \u2014 the Didymos binary asteroid system. (Image credit: ESA)<\/p>\n Hera is now set up for its rendezvous with the asteroids<\/a> in November 2026, thanks to a campaign of carefully planned engine burns that it performed in February and March.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “We divided the deep-space maneuver into three engine burns, plus one much smaller correction maneuver, carried out over a period of around four weeks,” Francesco Castellini from the Flight Dynamics team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Germany, said in a March 17 statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n “This is the Hera mission’s largest maneuver in terms of fuel consumption, and we used it to test all of the systems that we will need during the braking and rendezvous maneuvers later this year as we arrive at Didymos,” Castellini added.<\/p>\n These maneuvers burned 123 kilograms (271 pounds) of onboard hydrazine fuel and changed the spacecraft’s velocity by 367 meters per second (1,204 feet per second) \u2014 about 821 mph (1,321 kph). This amounts to “a change comparable to an object accelerating from stationary to supersonic flight<\/a>,” ESA officials wrote in the same statement. ESA’s Estrack network of deep space antennas confirmed the success of the engine burns.<\/p>\n Scientists are now beginning preparations for arrival at the asteroid system, including extensive onboard software updates.<\/p>\n Hera will begin a series of precision burns in October to shift the spacecraft out of its interplanetary cruise phase and set up rendezvous with the Didymos system. The spacecraft and its 12 payloads will spend at least six months studying the system, beginning with early global studies and then deploying its Milani and Juventas cubesats<\/a>, before then embarking on a more detailed mapping exercise. The primary mission will culminate in an experimental, close-up inspection of the DART impact crater from an altitude of around 1 kilometer (0.62 miles).<\/p>\n The aim of the series of detailed follow-up studies of Dimorphos is to help transform DART’s one-off kinetic impactor experiment into a repeatable, scalable asteroid-deflection method<\/a>.<\/p>\n While humanity’s knowledge of our solar system’s small worlds is slowly growing thanks to missions from across the globe, such as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (now OSIRIS-APEX<\/a>), JAXA’s Hayabusa2<\/a> and China’s Tianwen-2<\/a>, Hera will also be performing the first survey of a binary asteroid system.<\/p>\n![\"diagram](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/og569ksqnho6EWEkDHwWzQ.jpg\")
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