{"id":246994,"date":"2026-11-10T06:43:24","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T12:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/heras-first-close-up-view-of-didymos-asteroids"},"modified":"2026-11-10T06:43:24","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T12:43:24","slug":"heras-first-close-up-view-of-didymos-asteroids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/heras-first-close-up-view-of-didymos-asteroids","title":{"rendered":"Hera\u2019s first close-up view of Didymos asteroids"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The European Space Agency\u2019s Hera mission for planetary defence has acquired its first close-up of the Didymos binary asteroid system. NASA\u2019s DART spacecraft impacted the smaller Dimorphos asteroid on 26 September 2022 \u2013 but this image gives a novel view of its adjacent parent asteroid.<\/p>\n<p>In this image, acquired by Hera\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe first thing we said was wow!\u201d observes Hera Principal Investigator Patrick Michel, Director of Research at CNRS \/ Observatoire de la C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur. \u201cThis is the other side of Didymos from the one that DART\u2019s camera showed us shortly before impact, so this feels like looking at a whole new world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The European Space Agency\u2019s Hera mission for planetary defence has acquired its first close-up of the Didymos binary asteroid system. NASA\u2019s DART spacecraft impacted the smaller Dimorphos asteroid on 26 September 2022 \u2013 but this image gives a novel view of its adjacent parent asteroid. In this image, acquired by Hera\u2019s monochromatic Asteroid Framing Camera [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}