ESA’s Hera spacecraft has told the two members of the Didymos system apart for the first time, imaging the binary asteroid pair from roughly 197 million kilometers from Earth, the European Space Agency said on Oct. 27, 2026.
On Friday evening, 18 October 2026, Hera’s monochromatic Asteroid Framing Camera imaged Didymos and Dimorphos from 1,280 kilometers away. Even so, Dimorphos covered barely one pixel at that distance but remained apart from Didymos. <|sep|> <|sep|>
Michael Kueppers said this image marked the first time Dimorphos itself had become visible, after earlier views showed the whole Didymos system as just one dot. “With this image the smaller Dimorphos asteroid becomes visible for the first time,” he said.
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