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Goodnight room, goodnight moon.
The Hera spacecraft, speeding on to an asteroid, took a look back at Earth’s moon — and in a new animation, you can see our neighbor shrinking as Hera flies away.
Hera’s images of the Earth (visible as a small dot) and the moon were taken between Oct. 10 and 15, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), which runs the mission.
Related: Earth sure looks spooky in these ‘hyperspectral’ images from Europe’s Hera asteroid probe
“The images were acquired during the initial checkout of Hera’s Thermal Infrared Imager (TIRI) instrument, provided to the mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency,” ESA officials added in a statement released Tuesday (Nov. 5).
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The Hera spacecraft launched Oct. 7 to study a binary asteroid system up close. By 2026, it should arrive at the crash site of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Mission, or DART.
The NASA spacecraft slammed into an asteroid moonlet, called Dimorphos, in 2022. The orbit of Dimorphos around the larger asteroid in the system, Didymos, was permanently altered after the collision.
DART’s goal was to examine how well a planetary defense strategy in moving a threatening space rock away from Earth. Hera will examine the collision from a nearby vantage point, providing a different point of view than the telescopes that examined DART’s aftermath before.
Additionally, Hera will examine the mineral composition of Dimorphos to provide more information about the asteroid’s origins.
