Four years after NASA flew a spacecraft into a small asteroid on purpose, Europe's detective has arrived to look at the damage. ESA's Hera spacecraft has arrived at Didymos and its little moon Dimorphos, and it's now flying slow rectangles around them, about 25 to 30 kilometres out.
Liora Hale · Thursday 12 November 2026
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- Hera spacecraft in 'rectangular orbit' around target asteroids
- Hera's first close-up view of Didymos asteroids
- Four years after NASA's asteroid impact, ESA's Hera reveals what happened to Dimorphos (media invitation, Berlin 25 Nov)
- Hera's approach to target asteroids (image sequence)
- Braking news! Time for ESA's Hera asteroid mission to go slow
- Finding Hera's way: Flight Dynamics team in action
- ESA Operations on Bluesky: BRM-2 cut Hera's velocity by 70 m/s from 2300 km
- Hera mission timeline
- Hera's CubeSats
- Hera takes flight: Didymos, here we come
- Hera asteroid mission spies Mars's Deimos moon
- Hera team congratulates NASA asteroid impactors
- NASA's DART Mission Hits Asteroid in First-Ever Planetary Defense Test
- NASA Confirms DART Mission Impact Changed Asteroid's Motion in Space
- NASA's DART Data Validates Kinetic Impact as Planetary Defense Method
- Successful kinetic impact into an asteroid for planetary defence (Daly et al.)
- Momentum transfer from the DART mission kinetic impact on asteroid Dimorphos (Cheng et al.)
- Orbital period change of Dimorphos due to the DART kinetic impact (Thomas et al.)
- NASA Study: Asteroid's Orbit, Shape Changed After DART Impact
- NASA's DART Mission Changed Orbit of Asteroid Didymos Around Sun
- Direct detection of an asteroid's heliocentric deflection: The Didymos system after DART (Makadia et al.)
- 10 asteroid mysteries that ESA's Hera mission will explore (video)
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