Ever daydreamed about owning your own spaceship? As the next best thing – thanks to a free app launching today – anyone with an Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3 or 3S VR headset can have ESA’s Hera asteroid mission for planetary defence turn up in their own living room.

Developed by Italian startup DIVE in cooperation with ESA’s Hera mission team, the “Guardians of Earth” app allows users to peer within a virtual spacecraft, learn about how it works, assemble its elements and follow its journey through space to its target asteroid.

“The availability of this app makes for a great Christmas gift, allowing people to learn about and interact with our mission in a totally new and immersive way,” notes Hera mission manager Ian Carnelli. “This was a dream project for DIVE founder Luca De Dominicis, who sadly recently passed away, yet whose vision for making space exploration accessible to everyone continues through this collaboration.”

DIVE CEO Michaelangelo Mochi adds: “Partnering with ESA is a journey we cherish deeply, akin to astronauts venturing into the unknown. We are proud to work alongside an organisation that shares our vision and commitment to exploration.”

Launched last October, Hera is ESA’s first planetary defence mission, on its way to visit the first asteroid to have had its orbit altered by human action. By gathering close-up data about the Dimorphos asteroid, which was impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft in 2022, Hera will help turn asteroid deflection into a well understood and potentially repeatable technique. Hera is currently on its way to a ‘swingby’ of Mars next spring which will set on course towards Dimorphos.

With Guardians of Earth, users can engage with the Hera spacecraft in remarkable detail through augmented reality. They can choose to put it together piece by piece, discover its advanced instrumentation and experience key space travel technologies. Through the involvement of video game studio 34BigThings, the app offers a 360-degree immersive experience, projecting users into the cosmos with Hera, bringing them face-to-face with celestial bodies encountered along the way.

From today, the app is available for free on Apple Vision Pro from the App Store and for Meta Quest 3 and 3S.

Want to know more about the Hera mission? Try asking the mission ‘directly’, through Hera Space Companion, an interactive AI-powered assistant providing facts about the mission and real-time data from space. The Hera Space Companion has been developed by Terra Mater Studios, Impact AI, and Microsoft Austria in collaboration with ESA.