Asteroid probe snaps rare pics of Martian moon

By AFP
March 14, 2025
The surface of Mars and the face of Deimos, the smaller and more mysterious of Mars’ two moons, are photographed on March 12 by the European Space Agency’s HERA mission. — AFP
The surface of Mars and the face of Deimos, the smaller and more mysterious of Mars’ two moons, are photographed on March 12 by the European Space Agency’s HERA mission. — AFP

PARIS: On the way to investigate the scene of a historic asteroid collision, a European spacecraft swung by Mars and captured rare images of the red planet´s mysterious small moon Deimos, the European Space Agency said on Thursday.

Europe´s HERA mission is aiming to find out how much of an impact a Nasa spacecraft made when it deliberately smashed into an asteroid in 2022 in the first-ever test of our planetary defences.

But HERA will not reach the asteroid -- which is 11 million kilometres from Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter -- until late 2026. On the long voyage there, the spacecraft received a gravity boost by slingshotting around Mars on Wednesday. For an hour, it flew as close as 5,600-kms from the Martian surface, at a speed of 33,480-kms an hour.