ESA's Hera spacecraft sees asteroid Dimorphos as a separate object for the first time

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft has seen the two asteroids of the Didymos system as separate objects for the first time, ESA said on October 27, 2026. Hera's monochromatic Asteroid Framing Camera took the image from 1,280 km away, with the pair some 197 million km from Earth. Until now, Hera's camera had shown the system as a single dot. In the new image, the smaller asteroid, Dimorphos, covers only about one pixel, but it is clearly apart from its larger companion, Didymos.

“For the very first time we are seeing through Hera’s own eyes the very double asteroid system that the mission was designed and built for,” said Ian Carnelli, Hera's mission manager.

Slowing down to match two asteroids

Hera launched on October 7, 2024, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and used a Mars flyby in spring 2025 to change course and gain speed. To approach the asteroids, it had to brake hard. ESA scheduled the first braking maneuver for October 15, firing three of Hera's hydrazine thrusters at once for a total of 93 minutes to cut its speed relative to the asteroids by a few hundred meters per second, and a second, shorter burn of about 31 minutes for October 22.

The two burns, a week apart, slowed Hera to just 20 meters per second relative to its targets, ESA says, so it can now close in gradually. Three smaller maneuvers planned for late October were to bring its relative speed close to zero.

A crash-site investigation

Hera is the follow-up to a planetary defense experiment. On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft deliberately hit Dimorphos at 6.1 km per second. ESA says the collision threw a plume of debris across 10,000 km of space. It also made Dimorphos the first object in the solar system whose orbit has been measurably shifted by human action. In March 2026, NASA reported a study in the journal Science Advances showing that the impact also changed the orbit of the Didymos pair around the Sun, by 0.15 seconds in a 770-day orbit.

To turn this “kinetic impact” method into a well-understood defense technique, ESA says, scientists need to know what DART did to the asteroid itself: whether the impact left a crater or reshaped the whole body, what Dimorphos is made of, how it is built and how massive it is, and why it was deflected far more than impact simulations had predicted.

Over the coming months, Hera will survey Dimorphos up close with several instruments. It will release two shoebox-sized CubeSats for an even closer look, and the mission will eventually progress to landing.

What comes next

Hera's views will grow sharper as it moves closer. “We will unveil the first detailed images of Dimorphos – the first object in the Solar System to have had its orbit measurably shifted by human action – on 25 November,” Carnelli said.