Spacecraft · tracked live
Hera
Going back to look at what DART did. In 2022 NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into the small moon Dimorphos and shortened its orbit, but nobody was there to measure the mass it hit or the crater it left. Hera arrives in late 2026 to do exactly that, which is what turns a one-off demonstration into a technique that could be used again.
- Agency
- ESA
- Launched
- 2024-10-07 - still working
- From the Sun
- 196,942,702 km (-831,882 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 196,272,290 km (+133,171 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 11 min
- Travelling at
- 28.7 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A short cruise with a Mars flyby behind it, ending at the Didymos pair at the end of 2026 - where it will orbit an asteroid a few hundred metres across.
Along the way
- Mars flyby, with a close look at Deimos on the way past
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.