Hera asteroid mission takes stunning images of Mars’s moon Deimos

A mission to survey the results of a deliberate crash between an asteroid and a NASA spacecraft has taken stunning images of Mars and its moon Deimos

By Matthew Sparkes

13 March 2025

Mars appears light blue in this near-infrared image taken by the Hera spacecraft. Its moon Deimos is the dark mark towards the centre of the image

ESA

A space exploration mission to study an asteroid that NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into three years ago has taken stunning bonus images of Mars and its moon Deimos en route to its final destination. 

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in 2022 was an attempt to show that bodies on a collision course with our planet could be deliberately redirected to avoid catastrophic impact. Observations from Earth showed that by smashing the craft, which had a mass of 580 kilograms on impact, into the distant asteroid Dimorphos at 6.6 kilometres per second, NASA successfully changed the asteroid’s orbit. Dimorphos presents no risk to Earth and was merely acting as a test subject.

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Hera is a subsequent European Space Agency mission designed to get a closer look at the effect of the crash. The craft is around the size of a small car, weighing 1081 kilograms when fully fuelled. It launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 7 October 2024 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and did a flyby of Mars on 12 March 2025 on the way to the asteroid, which it won’t reach until October 2026.