Deimos Moon over Planet Mars | Europe's Hera Asteroid Mission

Deimos Moon over Planet Mars | Europe's Hera Asteroid Mission

The European Space Agency's Hera Mission captured this close-up view of the Martian moon Deimos at a distance of around 1,000 kilometers. Like Phobos, Deimos is a small and lumpy, heavily cratered object. Its craters are generally smaller than 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) in diameter, however, and it lacks the grooves and ridges seen on Phobos. When impacted, dust and debris will leave the surface of the moon because it does not have enough gravitational pull to retain the ejecta. However, the gravity from Mars will keep a ring of this debris around the planet in approximately the same region that the moon orbits. As the moon revolves, the debris is redeposited as a dusty layer on its surface. Deimos has a thick regolith, perhaps as deep as 328 feet (100 meters), formed as meteorites pulverized the surface.

Deimos is a dark body that appears to be composed of C-type surface materials, similar to that of asteroids found in the outer asteroid belt. 

The Hera spacecraft will revisit the Dimorphos asteroid to gather vital close-up data about the deflected body after NASA's DART Mission performed a grand-scale experiment by applying a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique. 

On September 26, 2022, moving at 6.1 km/s, NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into the Dimorphos asteroid. Part of our Solar System changed. The impact shrunk the orbit of the Great Pyramid-sized Dimorphos around its parent asteroid, the mountain-sized Didymos. 

The Hera Mission will also perform the most detailed exploration yet of a binary asteroid system—although binaries make up 15% of all known asteroids, one has never been surveyed in detail.

Hera will also perform technology demonstration experiments, including the deployment of the European Space Agency’s first deep space ‘CubeSats’—shoebox-sized spacecraft to venture closer than the main mission then eventually land—and an ambitious test of 'self-driving' for the main spacecraft, based on vision-based navigation.

Learn more about the Hera Mission:
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera

Image Processing by Andrea Luck: "For the colourisation, I've used a reference image from ESA's Mars Express of this area: HO544_000 in RGB, taken on 2023-06-09 (raw data available at psa.esa.int)

Credit: ESA/AFC/DLR/FUBerlin/Andrea Luck CC BY creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Image Date: March 12, 2025
Release Date: March 14, 2025

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