Falcon 9 rocket has successfully launched the European interplanetary vehicle Hera into space. Its target is the binary asteroid Didymos.
The Hera mission is funded by the European Space Agency. The total cost of the project, including the design and construction of the spacecraft, rocket launch and subsequent mission support amounted to 363 million euros. The target of the mission is the binary asteroid Didymos. The NASA-built DART probe crashed into its moon Dimorphos in 2022. Hera will have to study the asteroid pair to understand how the collision impacted it.
Initially, Hera was planned to be launched using Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket. However, due to delays in its commissioning, ESA had to use the services of SpaceX, which provided the Falcon 9 rocket.
Falcon 9 successfully completed its mission, sending Hera into interplanetary space. This launch differed from most typical SpaceX missions in that the rocket’s first stage, with flight number B1061, was used in a single-use configuration. It was the 23rd final flight. In this way, it repeated the record of the B1062 stage, which overturned and collapsed during its 23rd landing in August 2024.
It’s also worth noting that B1061 was the only one to land on all of SpaceX’s autonomous barges and landing sites on both the east and west coasts of the United States.
You can learn more about the technical design, objectives and flight plan of the Hera in our material.
