Today’s ESA blog post provides few details about the specific mission of the cube, but the agency writes that JuRa is a miniature version of a probe previously used to study the surface of a comet on the Rosetta mission launched in 2004. ESA says JuRa will break two records: It will be the smallest radar instrument flown into space and the first radar to study the interior of an asteroid.
The European Space Agency calls the cube-shaped radar JuRa, named after the Juventas cube satellite that will be carried aboard Hera. JuRa is a 10-centimeter box that will fly on the Juventas CubeSat when Hera visits the post-DART system Dimorphos-Didymos in a few years.
Juventas is one of Hera’s shoebox-sized companions on its mission to visit the site of NASA’s collision, the other being a CubeSat named Milani. Juventas will perform geophysical analyses of Dimorphos by measuring the asteroid’s gravity field and internal structure. Milani, on the other hand, will perform spectral analyses of Dimorphos to characterize the asteroid’s composition by examining any remaining dust clouds and assessing the impact of the DART impact.
As part of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, a spacecraft collided with Dimorphos, the latest member of the binary asteroid system, on Sept. 26, shortening its orbit around Didymos. Dimorphos’ orbital period around Didymos changed from 11 hours and 55 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes, an adjustment of 32 minutes. This corresponds to a movement of a few dozen meters. This is a promising start to developing an effective planetary defense strategy against threatening asteroids, but there is still much to learn about the DART experiment. Hence the upcoming Hera mission.