Your chance to run software in deep space on ESA's asteroid mission

The European Space Agency is offering European researchers and companies a rare and exciting opportunity to run their innovative software directly in deep space aboard ESA’s Hera mission, millions of kilometres away. The institutional report frames the development in practical terms and ties it to the broader mission or observing effort.

That matters because astronomy does not advance on single detections. The field builds confidence by accumulating independent observations across different wavelengths, instruments and epochs until isolated signals become defensible conclusions. What looks convincing in one dataset can dissolve when a second instrument looks at the same target, and what looks marginal can solidify when follow-up campaigns confirm the original reading. The current standard requires that a result survive this triangulation before the community treats it as settled. In mid-2027, ESA’s Hera mission is set to complete its primary planetary defence goals around the Didymos and Dimorphos asteroids. The spacecraft will then take on a new role, it will become a unique flying software laboratory 150 million km from Earth.

Dietmar Pilz, ESA’s Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, comments. These ideas will help ESA mature technologies that reduce reliance on ground control, increase mission resilience, and enable more capable future exploration missions.

If you have an idea that will push the boundaries of the mission even further, submit your ideas via ESA's Open Space Innovation Platform. Launched in 2024, Hera is currently on course to reach its target this autumn: asteroid Dimorphos.

In 2022 NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately impacted Dimorphos to shift its orbit around parent body Didymos. The submission will need to be submitted via an outline form, for an initial ESA evaluation.

What gives the story weight is not just the object itself, but the way the measurement trims the range of plausible physical explanations. Astronomy has accumulated enough cases to know that the most interesting results are rarely the ones that confirm expectations cleanly; they are the ones that confirm some expectations while complicating others, or that open a parameter space that previous instruments could not reach. The scientific community evaluates these contributions by asking whether the new data constrain a model in a way that older data could not, and whether those constraints survive systematic review.

In mid-October 2026, ESA will select the winning ideas. The chosen teams will be invited to submit their implementation package and source code in full for detailed validation, with a deadline for submitting the full implementation on.

Because the account originates with ESA Space News, it functions best as a primary institutional report that is close to the data and operations, not as independent scientific validation. Institutional communications are produced by organizations with legitimate interests in presenting their work in a favorable light, which does not make them unreliable but does make them partial. Details that complicate the narrative, including instrument limitations, unexpected failures and results below projections, tend to be minimized relative to progress messages. Technical documentation and peer-reviewed publications, where they exist, provide the complementary layer that institutional releases cannot substitute.

The next step is to see whether other instruments and other wavelengths tell the same story. Campaigns with JWST, the VLT, the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes and radio arrays will provide the spectral coverage and spatial resolution needed to move from detection to physical characterization. The timeline for that kind of confirmation is typically measured in years, not months, which is worth keeping in mind when reading the current result.

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