ESA's Hera arrives at the asteroids hit by NASA's DART and sends first close-ups

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft has reached Didymos and Dimorphos, the pair of asteroids that NASA's DART mission tested four years ago. On November 5, 2026, ESA released Hera's first close-up view, taken from about 60 km away. "The first thing we said was wow!" said principal investigator Patrick Michel.

Slowing down from 12 km/s

Hera launched on October 7, 2024, and used a Mars flyby in spring 2025 to steer toward the asteroids. By October 2026 it was moving more than 12 km/s relative to Earth, so it had to brake hard. The main burns came on October 15 (93 minutes, three thrusters firing together) and October 22 (about 31 minutes), followed by smaller trims to bring it nearly to a halt beside the asteroids.

On October 18, from about 1,280 km out, Hera's Asteroid Framing Camera showed the two asteroids as separate objects for the first time, with little Dimorphos covering about one pixel. The new 60 km image shows 780-meter-wide Didymos clearly, with a ridge around its equator, boulders, craters and possible grooves. Most of 151-meter Dimorphos sits in shadow. Interestingly, this is the far side of Didymos from the one DART's camera saw before impact.

Why it matters

On September 26, 2022, DART slammed into Dimorphos at 6.1 km/s and shortened its orbit around Didymos by about 33 minutes, more than predicted. It was the first time people measurably changed the path of a natural object in the solar system. But a single impact leaves big questions: did it leave a crater, or reshape the whole moonlet? How massive and how solid is Dimorphos?

Hera is the "crash site investigator" that will answer those questions, so that knocking an asteroid off course can become a reliable planetary-defense technique rather than a one-off experiment. Mission scientist Michael Kueppers noted that debris from the impact may have crossed the roughly 1 km gap and landed on Didymos, so some of the features seen now could be fresh.

Neither asteroid is a backyard target; the pair is currently about 197 million km from Earth.

What comes next: ESA will unveil the first detailed images of Dimorphos on November 25. Over the following months Hera will map both bodies and release two shoebox-sized CubeSats, Milani and Juventas, for an even closer look.