The European Space Agency's probe Hera snapped this image of the tiny and mysterious Martian moon of Deimos. The probe zipped by at 20,000 mph when it used a suite of instruments to capture the image from 620 miles away. Demos is just eight miles wide. By comparison, the other Mars moon, Phobos is, 14 miles across.
"These instruments have been tried out before, during Hera's departure from Earth, but this is the first time that we have employed them on a small distant moon for which we still lack knowledge," said mission scientist Michael Kueppers.
Hera is on its way to the asteroid Dimorphos to peek at the rock after NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into it as part of an asteroid deflection test.
From The Guardian:
Mars appears light blue in the shot taken by Hera's near-infrared Hyperscout H imager during a gravity-assist flyby on Wednesday. The slingshot manoeuvre around the planet will propel the spacecraft out towards the pair of asteroids it is due to reach in December next year.
Deimos appears as a dark blob near the bottom of the image. Above it is the bright Terra Sabaea region near the Martian equator. To the bottom right of Terra Sabaea is the 280-mile-wide Huygens crater, and the similarly sized Schiaparelli crater is to the left. The large, smooth patch near the bottom right is part of the Hellas Basin, among the largest impact craters in the solar system.
Previously:
• Just how big were the rocks we saw on Dimorphos seconds before impact?
• Impact! The DART mission, humanity's first attempt at redirecting an asteroid, finds its target
