Two cubesats on Hera signal home
Engineers on the ground have now established good communications with the two cubesats that are being carried by the European probe Hera on its way to the binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos.
“Each CubeSat was activated for about an hour in turn, in live sessions with the ground to perform commissioning – what we call ‘are you alive?’ and ‘stowed checkout’ tests,” explains ESA’s Hera CubeSats Engineer Franco Perez Lissi.
…Travelling with Hera are two shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ built up from standardised 10-cm boxes. These miniature spacecraft will fly closer to the asteroid than their mothership, taking additional risks to acquire valuable bonus data.
Juventas, produced for ESA by GOMspace in Luxembourg will make the first radar probe within an asteroid, while Milani, produced for ESA by Tyvak International in Italy, will perform multispectral mineral prospecting.
This use of small cubesats in conjunction with a larger interplanetary probe is becoming increasingly routine, and provides a cheap and efficient way to increase the data and information obtained. Note too that both cubesats were apparently built entirely by private companies, thus establishing their creditionals as providers of interplanetary probes.
Engineers on the ground have now established good communications with the two cubesats that are being carried by the European probe Hera on its way to the binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos.
“Each CubeSat was activated for about an hour in turn, in live sessions with the ground to perform commissioning – what we call ‘are you alive?’ and ‘stowed checkout’ tests,” explains ESA’s Hera CubeSats Engineer Franco Perez Lissi.
…Travelling with Hera are two shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ built up from standardised 10-cm boxes. These miniature spacecraft will fly closer to the asteroid than their mothership, taking additional risks to acquire valuable bonus data.
Juventas, produced for ESA by GOMspace in Luxembourg will make the first radar probe within an asteroid, while Milani, produced for ESA by Tyvak International in Italy, will perform multispectral mineral prospecting.
This use of small cubesats in conjunction with a larger interplanetary probe is becoming increasingly routine, and provides a cheap and efficient way to increase the data and information obtained. Note too that both cubesats were apparently built entirely by private companies, thus establishing their creditionals as providers of interplanetary probes.