The Milani nanosatellite (Tyvak International is the Italian prime contractor) will be launched aboard HERA, spacecraft of theESA (European Space Agency), which will begin its journey towards the asteroid Dimorphos in late 2024, hit in September 2022 by NASA's DART spacecraft. HERA will reach the Didymos/Dimorphos binary asteroid system in 2027, for a detailed study of the consequences of the collision.
VISTA (Volatile In-Situ Thermogravimetre Analyser), a detector designed and built by three Italian research institutes INAF IAPS (lead), CNR-IIA e Politecnico di Milano it will be one of the two sensors aboard Milani. At the end of 2022, the VISTA flight model was delivered to the prime contractor, successfully meeting the development deadlines. The sensors and electronics developed in IIA have passed all the tests foreseen for the flight model, and the work done will be used as a starting point for future projects to measure compounds in space travel even with the presence of humans (responsible scientist Zampetti E.).