During a flyby of Mars on Wednesday (March 12), ESA's Hera spacecraft inaugurated use of its science instruments to image the smaller of the planet's two moons, Deimos. The European Space Agency ...

While on a flyby of Mars, Hera was able to use three of its imaging instruments to capture images of Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons, the ESA said. Deimos is about 15,000 miles from Mars.

The Hera mission spacecraft captured views of the moon's far side, swinging within 625 miles of Deimos in space. While the car-sized spacecraft flew around the Mars system, flight controllers on ...

Martian moon Deimos seen crossing the face of Mars in this sequence of Thermal Infrared Imager images acquired during the Hera mission's gravity-assist flyby of Mars on March 12, 2025.

On 12 March 2025, the Hera spacecraft used Mars's gravity to accelerate its journey to the Didymos/Dimorphos binary asteroid system. The probe's camera system, developed and built in Germany, captured ...

“The excitement was such that we didn’t get any sleep.” Hera was using Mars in what is known as a gravity assist, both accelerating the spacecraft and adjusting its flight path. But its ...

Hera, European Space Agency’s (ESA) flagship planetary defense mission that launched in October 2024, took images of Mars and Deimos, one of its two moons, March 12. The mission’s flyby was ...

But HERA will not reach the asteroid — which is 11 million kilometers from Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — until late 2026. On the long voyage there, the spacecraft swung ...

Hera came as near as 5000 kilometres to the surface of Mars, receiving a gravity boost that will fling it onwards to Dimorphos. The manoeuvre shortened its journey time by many months and saved it ...

Although just a test of Hera's three main instruments, the mission is hoped to shed a bit more light on the small satellite of the neighboring planet. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos ...