The ESA Hera Mission to the Binary Asteroid (65803) Didymos: One Year After Launch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) was launched successfully on October 7, 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center of Cape Canaveral with a Falcon 9 from the Space X company. After a commissioning phase and images of the Earth and its Moon with the three kinds of imagers onboard the spacecraft, namely the Asteroid Framing Camera (AFC), the Hyperspectral Imager (Hyperscout-H) and the Thermal Infrared Imager (TIRI), as well as a deep space maneuver, Hera was put in a trajectory towards Mars. On March 12, it performed a Mars flyby during which images of the red planet and of its second Moon Deimos were taken by the three instruments. The rendezvous with the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos will occur in the fall of 2026 and investigations of the system will be performed during 6 months. The mission will answer the remaining questions left after all NASA DART data were analyzed, offering both a full documentation of the first asteroid deflection test performed by DART and a full characterization of the binary system, including measurements that were not performed yet by any asteroid missions. Hera is the first mission that includes a main spacecraft and two cubesats for deep space exploration of an asteroid, with the three components operating at the same time in a binary system, and finally landing on one or the two binary components. With its only four years of development, from industrial contract to launch, Hera paves the way to future fast asteroid mission implementations, such as RAMSES to Apophis, contributing to the necessity to be able to develop fast reconnaissance mission in the framework of planetary defense.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".