The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera launched successfully from Florida on October 7th, 2024. Gofore’s subsidiary Huld’s team in Czechia contributed to the development and testing of the software for the mission, which is part of ESA’s planetary defense initiative.
As part of the world’s first asteroid deflection test, Hera will conduct an in-depth post-impact study of Dimorphos, the moonlet orbiting the binary asteroid system Didymos. With NASA’s DART mission having successfully impacted Dimorphos, Hera’s role is to transform this large-scale experiment into a reliable and repeatable planetary defense technique.
Hera spacecraft includes two CubeSats, which are released in close proximity to the asteroid.
Huld’s experts contributed to developing and testing the control software for the mothercraft. Also, Huld participated in developing software for one of the CubeSats – Milani. It is a critical part of the control software, data processing unit software to interface with payload, enhanced with AI to analyse the acquired images. Further, Huld is developing an experiment, so called AI-FDIR (“prediction of failures”), which will be uploaded during cruises to Hera. This software identifies possible failures, for example, with the aging of the system.
“We dedicated more than 20 000 hours of work to the mission, and we hope that the precious Milani CubeSat which is being carried on board of the main spacecraft will function perfectly and will bring us interesting data about the composition and structure of Dimorphos, a near-Earth asteroid.” –Anna Rojkova, Director, Huld Czechia
Special thanks to all our outstanding partners, including Tyvak International, Spacebel, Institute of Geology of the Czech Academy of Science and Brno University of Technology for their exceptional collaboration throughout the project. Together, we’ve worked hard to create innovative solutions that will help humanity better understand and mitigate potential asteroid threats.
Picture © ESA/ATG medialab