Finally, Space Sci Rev has published (vol. 222):
Vincent, J. B. Kovács, G. Nagy, B. V. et al. The Asteroid Framing Cameras on ESA’s Hera Mission 31 s11214-026-01288-5
Hera successfully launched to, and is now bound for, the binary asteroid(s) (65803) Didymos and Dimorphos. Although we got images from DART and LICIACube, they were flyby (…) spacecraft and could not take long, lingering closeups. LICIACube, in particular, got some shots after the DART impact, but only from the backside of Dimorphos, not the side that was struck. That’s the job of Hera.
Hera will fully characterize the Didymos system, both for its own sake and in the context of the DART deflection experiment. We have never had a spacecraft orbit a binary system; the Galileo mission to (243) Ida and its satellite Dactyl flew by too fast, like LICIACube, to really get good data. Apart from other instruments (including instruments on two CubeSats), Hera will bring to bear its primary camera(s), AFC (Asteroid Framing Camera(s)). There are two, AFC1 and AFC2, because they are also the probe’s navigation instruments, and failure would bring down the whole mission.
The AFCs are built on the design (“ASTROhead”) of the prior Northrop Grumman MEV (Mission Extension Vehicle). Conceptually, the principle (including use of two cameras) dates back to Dawn at Vesta/Ceres. AFC vaguely looks like the Dawn cameras (“FC”- framing camera(s)), and was also built in Germany. One thing I’d have liked the paper to have included were big, hi-res “glamor shots” of the flight hardware. No such luck- perhaps the current design is commercial and proprietary?
The paper does include ground testing and calibrations. It does not include flight calibrations, e. g., shots of starfields, Mars, and the satellites Deimos and Phobos. You can read some of the gory details on the cameras, but we’re told the inflight data and cal will be in a follow-on paper.