Juventas CubeSat deployment

The shoebox-sized Juventas CubeSat will perform a radar probe of the Dimorphos asteroid, one of two miniature CubeSats being carried aboard ESA's Hera mission for planetary defence. Juventas and the Milani hyperspectral CubeSat will spend Hera’s two-year cruise phase to Didymos inside a pair of ‘Deep Space Deployers’ which will keep them alive and healthy. The pair will be deployed one at a time, starting with a partial deployment to check each CubeSat’s functionality. Finally, they will be deployed at just a few centimetres per second – any faster and they would risk being lost in space within the prevailing low gravity.