A European spacecraft on its way to study NASA’s asteroid crash site made an unexpected detour to capture unprecedented images of Mars’ lesser-known moon, Deimos. The Hera mission spacecraft flew within 625 miles of Deimos and captured the first-ever views of the far side of the moon.
Deimos is one of two moons orbiting Mars, but scientists know relatively little about it due to its tidally locked rotation, which means only one side has been seen on the Red Planet. The new images provide valuable insights into the moon’s topography, including a depression resembling a “saddle” and small craters.
Brian May, astrophysicist and co-founder of Queen, is part of the Hera science team and helped decipher complex data from the raw images. He described the experience as “colossal” and said seeing the whole scene in front of him was like being there himself.
The flyby was a necessary maneuver to put the spacecraft on the right trajectory toward its ultimate destination. Scientists hope that the new data will help them understand where Deimos came from, whether it was once an asteroid captured in orbit around Mars or is a chunk of the planet itself.
The Hera mission used three instruments during the flyby: a black-and-white navigation camera, a hyperspectral imager, and a thermal infrared imager. Thousands of images were collected, and the team is still processing them. The spacecraft will rendezvous with Dimorphos, an asteroid previously slammed by a NASA spacecraft, in 2026.
In about two years, Hera will begin a crash investigation into the target asteroids from NASA’s DART mission, following up on a test conducted in 2022 when NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a harmless asteroid.
Source: https://mashable.com/article/mars-moon-deimos-hera-flyby-images