Last pre-launch view of Hera CubeSat

A last glimpse by human eyes of the Juventas CubeSat, as it is installed aboard ESA’s Hera planetary defence spacecraft within Space X’s Payload Processing Facility.

Like its counterpart Milani CubeSat, the next time this shoebox-sized spacecraft will be revealed will be in two years’ time, when the pair are deployed into space around the Didymos binary asteroid.

The Juventas CubeSat carries a radar instrument, to perform the first radar probe of an asteroid’s internal structure, along with a gravity-detecting gravimeter. Milani hosts a multispectral imager to map surface mineralogy as well as a dust surveyor.

Juventas has now been installed inside the slot-shaped Deep Space Deployer directly below it on Hera’s topside ‘Asteroid Deck’.

This deployer will keep the CubeSat alive and healthy during the mission’s cruise phase, exchanging telemetry and telecommands with the ground, updating software, charging batteries, test reaction wheels and performing final health checks.

Milani’s own Deep Space Deployer is located on the other side of the Asteroid Deck (see the full layout of the Asteroid Deck here).

Deployment of the two CubeSats at the asteroids will be a gradual, methodical process. It will begin with springs to push each CubeSat up to the top of their deployer, but they will remain linked to Hera through an umbilical for power and communications.

Over an approximately 24-hour period each CubeSat will have its systems activated and checked out while exposed to space – including the inter-satellite links that will be used to communicate back with Hera – before undergoing their final release at a velocity of just a few centimetres per second. If they moved any faster in the ultra-low gravity environment of Didymos then Hera’s CubeSats would risk getting lost in space.

Read more on the Hera mission in our downloadable Launch Kit.