Henon’s firsts

ESA’s Heliospheric Pioneer for Solar and Interplanetary Threats Defence, Henon for short, is set to be the first ever stand-alone CubeSat to perform significant manoeuvres on the way to its far-away destination – an orbit that will take the spacecraft up to 24 million km from Earth, far beyond the 2 million km boundary of where deep space is said to begin.

While Henon will not be ESA’s first CubeSat to fly so far from Earth – Hera mission’s Juventas and Milani will claim that title – it will be the first to fly alone, without a parent spacecraft.

Roger Walker, ESA’s Technology CubeSats manager, explains: “Juventas and Milani will communicate with the larger Hera spacecraft via radio-based inter-satellite links, leaving Hera to transmit their findings back to Earth. Henon, on the other hand, will be able to independently communicate with ground stations through ESA’s Estrack network, thanks to a new miniaturised deep-space transponder currently under development.”