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Decoding Hera

s an ESA mission to the Didymos binary asteroid system. It will arrive there in December 2026 to study the asteroids and the effects of the impact of DART on Dimorphos.

I needed to find the spacecraft’s signal by moving the antenna in the blind, and continue tracking it by hand by tweaking the pointing every few minutes. Clearly NASA DSN, which was supporting this mission, had better quality ephemerides available at the time of launch, or otherwise they would have not been able to track the spacecraft (they have smaller antennas for searching, but their dishes are 34 metres). I finished the recording because I was already tired of tracking by hand and the signal level was already weak, so I didn’t know if it would be decodable, but the spacecraft continued to be in view for several hours after this.

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