The Red Planet and its tiny moon Deimos were recorded at a very near distance as the asteroid-chasing spacecraft completed a flyby on Wednesday.
An asteroid-chasing spacecraft just swung past Mars on Wednesday. As it zipped by, it took hundreds of shots of the Red Planet, as well as several snaps of Deimos, one of the two small Martian moons.
The operators of the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft were bewitched by the sci-fi aesthetics of the pictures.
“We were waiting with impatience to get these images,” said Patrick Michel, the principal investigator for Hera, during a Thursday news conference at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. When the first shots of the moon appeared, many of the Hera team members burst into cheers. “We’ve never seen Deimos in that way,” Dr. Michel said.
Navigators managed to fly Hera about 600 miles above Deimos, a craggy moon just nine miles long. The pass shows the object in remarkable detail — a small island gliding above the crater-scarred Martian desert.
During the news conference, Ian Carnelli, the Hera project manager, was misty-eyed. “I’m going to get emotional,” he said. “The excitement was such that we didn’t get any sleep.”
Hera was using Mars in what is known as a gravity assist, both accelerating the spacecraft and adjusting its flight path. But its mission operators also wanted to take advantage of the Martian flyby and use it to test the mechanical eyes that will allow Hera to study the asteroid it is targeting, Dimorphos.