ESA probe captures new Mars images

The European Space Agency (ESA) presented images gathered by its space probe Hera which performed a flyby of Mars a day earlier.

The flyby of Mars enabled the space probe to be “slingshot” in the direction of its final destination, the asteroids Dimorphos and the larger Didymos, said the project's manager, Ian Carnelli.

The purpose of ESA’s Hera asteroid mission is to model out a defence system and make asteroid deflection into a “well understood and repeatable technique”, according to ESA.

Carnelli, ESA project manager, says there are more than 100 million asteroids in the solar system, of which 30,000 are currently tracked as potentially dangerous.

“Today, we know more than 90% of the 'dinosaur killer ones' and we are not scared about those, but the small asteroids, hundred meter size, these are very difficult to see”, Carnelli said, adding that the gathered scientific data helped the understanding of asteroids in order to deflect them if needed.

The images presented in the German city of Darmstadt were taken from a distance of 5,000 km from Mars.

"During the flyby here, I took more than a thousand images. We just collected them last night. We have processed some of them that we are showing today for the first time, and we're looking at it in different wavelengths, which gives us an understanding of the composition of the moon with respect to Mars. And the scientists are now analysing the data to try to understand what are the differences between the planets and the moon and give us some clues, some understanding of its origin," Carnelli added.

They show the surface of the red planet and Deimos, one of Mars’s two moons, from a “point of view that was never seen before”, according to Carnelli.