Dublin, Ireland., 15th September 2020 – InnaLabs® is delighted to announce that ARIETIS-NS, a Rad-Tolerant Gyro System has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA), OHB and GMV for Hera; A Planetary Defence Mission to support deep-space navigation. The contract was signed at ESA’s ESOC centre in Germany, by Franco Ongaro, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, and Marco Fuchs, CEO of Germany space company OHB.
Named after the Greek goddess of marriage – Hera will go alongside NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect (DART) spacecraft, humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system called Didymos.
Hera is Europe’s contribution to an international planetary defence collaboration among European and US scientists called the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment, AIDA. The DART spacecraft – due for launch in July 2021 – will first perform a kinetic impact on the smaller of the two bodies. Hera will follow-up with a detailed post-impact survey to turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable asteroid deflection technique.
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