CubeSat’s tiny asteroid radar

This 10cm box will go down in history as the smallest radar instrument ever launched into space and the first to probe the interior of an asteroid. the target? Asteroid Demorphos, whose orbit shifted on the night of September 26 and sent a huge 10,000km plume into space colliding with NASA’s DART mission.

this radarIt will be connected by a 1.5-meter quadruple antenna aboard the Juventas CubeSat portable spacecraft, which in turn will be flown to Dimorphos on the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft, which will be launched in two years. .

Hera – currently in training at the OHB in Germany and Avio in Italy – will fly to Dimorphos to closely observe the DART effect, gathering important information such as the size of the DART crater, the mass and internal composition of Dimorphos. and structure. Additional Hera data will help transform the DART tilting experience into a well understood and repeatable technology that may one day be needed in the real world.

HERA, in fact, is not just one, but three spacecraft: it brings with it the first depth of ESA-space CubeSats to make further observations on asteroid targets. It radarThe hosts of Juventus, accompanied by Melanie, will examine the composition of the Dimorphos surface and its powders.

The “JuRa” instrument is a scaled-down version of the radar launched aboard the European Space Agency’s Comet Rosetta mission and is used to probe beneath the black surface of Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It was developed by the group of Dr. Alain Herrick at the Institut Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) at the University of Grenoble-Alpes and the group of Dr. Dirk Pletmeier of the Technical University of Dresden, together with Emtronix in Luxembourg, they were responsible for manufacturing the device.