The Hera Radio Science Experiment at Didymos

Abstract

Hera represents the European Space Agency's inaugural planetary defense space mission and plays a pivotal role in the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment international collaboration with NASA DART mission that performed the first asteroid deflection experiment using the kinetic impactor techniques. With the primary objective of conducting a detailed post-impact survey of the Didymos binary asteroid following the DART impact on its small moon called Dimorphos, Hera aims to comprehensively assess and characterize the feasibility of the kinetic impactor technique in asteroid deflection while conducting an in-depth investigation of the asteroid binary, including its physical and compositional properties as well as the effect of the impact on the surface and shape of Dimorphos. In this work, we describe the Hera radio science experiment, which will allow us to precisely estimate critical parameters, including the mass, which is required to determine the momentum enhancement resulting from the DART impact, mass distribution, rotational states, relative orbits, and dynamics of the asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos. Through a multi-arc covariance analysis, we present the achievable accuracy for these parameters, which consider the full expected asteroid phase and are based on ground radiometric, Hera optical images, and Hera to CubeSats InterSatellite Link radiometric measurements. The expected formal uncertainties for Didymos and Dimorphos GM are better than 0.01% and 0.1%, respectively, while their J2 formal uncertainties are better than 0.1% and 10%, respectively. [...]

References in corpus (12)

• Momentum Transfer from the DART Mission Kinetic Impact on Asteroid Dimorphos
• Orbital Period Change of Dimorphos Due to the DART Kinetic Impact
• Preliminary mission profile of Hera's Milani CubeSat
• The Excited Spin State of Dimorphos Resulting from the DART Impact
• Predictions for the Dynamical States of the Didymos System before and after the Planned DART Impact
• Near-Earth Asteroid Satellite Spins Under Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Doubly Synchronous Binary Asteroid Mass Parameter Observability
• Figure-Figure Interaction Between Bodies Having Arbitrary Shapes and Mass Distributions: A Power Series Expansion Approach
• The Dynamical State of the Didymos System Before and After the DART Impact
• Dimorphos orbit determination from mutual events photometry
• Energy Dissipation in Synchronous Binary Asteroids
• Analysis of NASA's DSN Venus Express radio occultation data for year 2014

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The Dynamical State of the Didymos System Before and After the DART Impact