Media Briefing on ESA Hera Mission – One Month Before Launch; Updates on the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo Mission to Mercury: The Closest Flyby of a Planet Ever

An EPSC2024 press briefing was held on Friday 13 September at the Freie Universität Berlin and online. The briefing covered two topics, with the following programme:

12:00 CEST: Welcome Anita Heward, Press Officer, EPSC2024

12:05 CEST: ESA Hera Mission: One Month Before Launch In just under one month, ESA’s Hera mission will set off to make a detailed post-impact survey of the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which was impacted by NASA’s DART mission on 26 September 2022. Representatives of the Hera team will discuss expectations, current status and future plans for the mission, and summarise results from data extracted from DART to date.

Speakers:

• Michael Küppers, ESA Hera Project Scientist, ESA-ESAC, Spain
• Patrick Michel, Hera Mission Principal Investigator, DART Investigation Team, Director of Research at CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, France.

12:30 CEST: Updates on the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo Mission to Mercury: The Closest Flyby of a Planet Ever Following the successful flyby of Mercury by the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 4 September 2024, members of the mission and science team will present an update on the latest rendezvous, plans for the remainder of the mission, as well as results from previous flybys.

Speakers:

• Johannes Benkhoff and Geraint Jones, ESA BepiColombo Project Scientists, ESA-ESTEC, Netherlands
• Ignacio Clérigo, BepiColombo Spacecraft Operations Manager, ESA-ESOC, Germany
• Prof Yasumasa Kasaba, Tohoku University, Japan and PI of PWI instrument on the JAXA spacecraft Mio
• Hayley Williamson, Swedish Institute for Space Physics, Co-I on the SERENA Instrument
• Jack Wright, Research Fellow with ESA.
• Isabel Krüll, universität Bremen, Bremen; TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany.

Further information

Details of all scientific sessions and presentation abstracts for EPSC2024 can be found at the official website: https://www.epsc2024.eu/

An overview of the programme can be found here: https://www.epsc2024.eu/epsc2024-session-overview.pdf