The European Space Agency’s Hera mission for planetary defence has acquired its first close-up of the Didymos binary asteroid system. NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted the smaller Dimorphos asteroid on 26 September 2022 – but this image gives a novel view of its adjacent parent asteroid.

In this image, acquired by Hera’s monochromatic Asteroid Framing Camera from 60 km away, most of the 151-m diameter Dimorphos asteroid is hidden by shadow but the 780-m diameter Didymos asteroid that the smaller moonlet orbits around is shown clearly.

“The first thing we said was wow!” observes Hera Principal Investigator Patrick Michel, Director of Research at CNRS / Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur. “This is the other side of Didymos from the one that DART’s camera showed us shortly before impact, so this feels like looking at a whole new world.