The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft captured this photo of the asteroid Didymos and its smaller companion Dimorphos on Oct. 18 October, from a distance of 795 miles (1,280 kilometers). (Image credit: ESA)

Europe's Hera planetary defense spacecraft is closing in on the binary asteroid system targeted by NASA's DART deflection test, and can now tell the two rocky bodies apart.

Hera is nearing the end of its voyage to the Didymos asteroid system, having launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in October 2024. The spacecraft snapped the image of Didymos and the smaller Dimorphos on Oct. 18 from a distance of 795 miles (1280 kilometers) from the pair, which are currently about 122 million miles (197 million km) from Earth.

"With this image, the smaller Dimorphos asteroid becomes visible for the first time," Michael Kueppers, Hera project scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), said in a statement . "Before this acquisition, the spacecraft was still resolving the Didymos system as a single dot.…