Hera (Falcon 9)
7 October 2024
Space Launch Complex 40
Cape Canaveral Space Force Station

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hera mission to interplanetary transfer orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:52 a.m. on 7 October 2024.

Due to the additional performance required to deliver the payload to an interplanetary transfer orbit, this mission marks the 23rd and final launch for this Falcon 9 first stage booster, which previously launched Crew-1, Crew-2, SXM-8, CRS-23, IXPE, Transporter-4, Transporter-5, Globalstar FM15, ISI EROS C-3, Korea 425, Maxar 1, ASBM, and 10 Starlink missions.

Hera is a planetary defense mission that will study the impact NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft had on the Dimorphos asteroid, which Falcon 9 launched in November 2021. Hera will provide valuable data for future asteroid deflection missions and science to help humanity’s understanding of asteroid geophysics as well as solar system formation and evolutionary processes.
Launch views clouded out.
FROM EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY & SPACEX MEDIA RELEASES
SpaceX Falcon 9 Hera launch profile. IMAGE CREDIT: SPACEX
As part of the world’s first test of asteroid deflection, Hera will perform a detailed post-impact survey of the target asteroid, Dimorphos – the orbiting moonlet of a binary asteroid system known as Didymos. Now that NASA’s DART mission has impacted the moonlet, Hera will turn the grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique while demonstrating new technologies from autonomous navigation around an asteroid to low gravity proximity operations, Hera will be humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system and Europe’s flagship Planetary Defender.
ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence seen approaching the Dimorphos asteroid moonlet. IMAGE CREDIT: ESA
Hera glides past Didymos to Dimorphos. IMAGE CREDIT: ESA
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