“Our team of Spain and Romania has been working on this technology for almost 15 years. The same was originally proposed for allowing soft precise lunar landing,” adds Andrea. “The system needs to have a rough shape model and the ‘rotational ephemerides’ of the target body – how much it is rotating, and in which direction – but is overwise quite robust. The problem was that before launch it had only been tested on GMV’s GNC robotic testbed platform-art in Madrid, but there had been no time to do the same on the full-scale Hera Avionics Test Bench at prime contractor OHB in Bremen.

“So we were very grateful for the chance to try it out for real as Hera flew past Mars. We were confident it would work well, because we simulated Mars in detail using ESA’s Planetary and Asteroid Natural scene Generation Utility, PANGU, and ran it through our GNC testbed. The actual flyby results broadly matched our simulation, but the system impressed us with its robustness: we didn’t lose track of any targets across the planet during the activation.”