No surprise: ESA’s Ministerial Council approved (officially…) the RAMSES mission. While meeting this week (26-27 Nov… US holiday), the European Space Agency’s Council of Ministers officiated Agency matters. RAMSES is now on track to rendezvous with Apophis in ~2029, partly because it was already on track. ESA had already awarded a contract with spacecraft prime contractor OHB, and started paying them. The surprise would have been if the Council didn’t give formal approval.
ESA is not known to be a fast-moving space agency. That’s what you get with a multi-headed bureaucracy, whose official ministers officially meet not even once a year. Therefore, the OHB initial contract was signed over a year ago. Fortunately, everyone expected that this approval was just a formality, and all were already onboard with the Apophis 2029 program. And fortunately, RAMSES (Rapid Apophis Mission for SpacE Safety) is basically a rebuild of Hera. Building and launching a ‘second Hera’ is cheaper and less risky, both in cost and schedule overruns.
There are some changes from Hera, but nothing serious and seriously technological. The basic structure and the only vital instrument, the cameras (also used for navigation, and thus dual-redundant) are the same. (Even here, they were derived from Dawn cameras.) The visible difference is larger propellant tanks; the trajectory to Apophis is less favorable than the Didymos-Dimorphos mission. Also, the Japanese are contributing- besides an infrared instrument, already flown on Hera- new, lighter solar arrays. If anything, this is a more significant change, since the power source is mission-critical, and I don’t estimate the ‘old’ solar arrays to have been that heavy in the first place.
Good luck, OHB, science teams, ESA, JAXA, etc. Making the Apophis launch window is no sure bet, rebuild or not. We also have no guarantee that OSIRIS-APEX will be funded to meet Apophis, either.