After Nasa’s successful DART mission, to make a deflecting impact on an asteroid, comes the Milani nanosatellite, which is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) follow-up Hera mission…

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Milani has successfully passed its Test Readiness Review, Tyvak International has announced. The craft represents two firsts: it will be the first to orbit an asteroid, Dimorphos; and it will be the ESA’s first deep-space nanosatellite.

Hera
It is a critical component of the Hera planetary defense mission and will follow on from the successful impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft on the same asteroid. The Hera mission – described as “Europe’s flagship Planetary Defender” – will perform a detailed post-impact survey and aims to help turn the asteroid deflection experiment into a well-understood planetary defense technique.

To achieve its objectives Hera will be using new technologies such as autonomous navigation around an asteroid to low-gravity proximity operations.

Milani’s instruments are an ASPECT hyperspectral imager (by VTT, Finland), the VISTA (Volatile In-Situ Thermogravimetre Analyser) dust detector, and the Navigation Camera developed by Tyvak International with the collaboration of Politecnico di Milano for Image Processing algorithms.

Finally, laser reflectors (by INFN, Italy) will enable “unprecedented” gravity field measurements of the asteroid coupled with Hera’s laser range finder.

Milani
It is a companion nanosatellite of Juventas in the mission, and they’ll both be carried by their Hera mothercraft to the Didymos pair of near-Earth asteroids.

The Milani 6U CubeSat is named after Professor Andrea Milani, the pioneer of asteroid risk analysis who came up with the original double-spacecraft Don Quixote mission concept from which the DART-Hera missions were derived, says Tyvak.

Passing the Test Readiness Review is a crucial milestone for the Didymos programme, said the company, which is part of the Terran Orbital Corporation, the aerospace and defence specialist.

“Admiring the Milani spacecraft fully integrated brings lots of emotions that pay off the tens of thousands of hours of cutting edge engineering efforts,” said ESA Hera Project Manager Ian Carnelli.

“Tyvak International has proved unprecedented commitment to bring this project from blueprints to reality, we can’t wait for the environmental test campaign to be completed and start testing with the Hera spacecraft. One step closer to Didymos.”

Tyvak International has been responsible for Milani’s design and build, and will also look after mission operations. It has been working as part of a European consortium involving research centres from Finland, Czech Republic, and Italy.

CIRA
What comes next? The satellite will complete an Environmental Test Campaign at Laboratorio di Qualifica Spaziale of CIRA (Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali, Capua, Italy), after which it will return to Tyvak for the last tests and verification.

It is expected that Milani will then be delivered to ESA, early 2024, to support the Hera electromagnetic compatibility test campaign and extensive System Validation Tests (SVTs), involving the mission ground segment as well.