Meet the Hera team

Hera – named after the Greek goddess of marriage – is a candidate ESA mission that will be humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system.

Hera is led by a multi-national team of scientists and engineers; humanity’s makers and doers. ESA is working with a variety of external space experts to develop the mission, including two consortiums that are each developing a CubeSat. Hera will carry these CubeSats to Didymoon; these briefcase-sized spacecraft will be able to take more risks than Hera itself, flying closer to the asteroid with a suite of state-of-the-art science instruments. They will eventually touch down.

This image is taken from the video Hera: ESA’s Planetary Defence Mission.