Design the patch for Hera’s Milani CubeSat

ESA is offering graphic designers and artists a unique opportunity to feature their work on the Milani CubeSat’s mission patch. This competition is an exciting opportunity for students of graphic art or design, or early career graphic artists and designers to make one of their designs a part of space history.

You can enter the contest using this online form. Post your design online on social media and include a link.

Hera is a planetary defence mission, part of ESA's Space Safety programme. It is Europe's contribution to an ambitious double-spacecraft endeavour, testing an asteroid deflection technique for the first time in history.

First came NASA’s DART spacecraft which impacted asteroid Dimorphos on 26 September 2022, slightly modifying its orbit around its parent asteroid, Didymos.

Hera, carrying two smaller CubeSats, will conduct a detailed post-impact survey of Dimorphos gathering unique scientific data in order to turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable asteroid deflection technique. 

Hera's Milani CubeSat, developed and engineered for ESA by Tyvak International in Turin, Italy, is named after Andrea Milani, the late professor of mathematics at Pisa University and pioneer of asteroid impact monitoring.

Milani devised the original Don Quijote asteroid deflection demonstration concept: to shift the orbital trajectory of an asteroid through the impact of one spacecraft, while a second spacecraft performs close-up post-impact observations to validate the experiment.

The 2005 Don Quijote mission architecture was a paper study but had a wide influence in the planetary defence community, leading almost two decades later to the international Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission. NASA would contribute the DART impactor spacecraft and ESA producing the monitor spacecraft – Hera.

Milani, one of Hera's two CubeSats, will be integrated into its mothercraft before the launch and will stay there for a two-year journey to the asteroid. Upon release, Milani will start its mission aiming at enhancing the overall scientific return of the Hera mission. Furthermore, it will have to navigate around the asteroid (using a dedicated Navigation Camera) and communicate with Earth relying on an inter-satellite link with Hera.

Milani hosts three scientific instruments: ASPECT is a hyperspectral imager which will take high resolution images of the Didymos and Dimorphos asteroids, mapping the surfaces while focusing on the impact crater created by the DART spacecraft. VISTA, a thermogravimeter, will characterise the Didymos environment by analyzing the presence of fine dust. In addition, Milani's presence near Didymos will provide observables to the Hera radio-science experiment, to support the characterisation of Didymos' gravity field.

The Milani Mission patch must be stylistically congruent with the existing Hera mission patch (found here) and represent the core tenets of Milani's scientific mission. The design shall be implemented within the attached blank Milani patch template (downloadable here in EPS format - the name of the mission to be placed within the patch).

The winner will be invited to view the Hera spacecraft in ESTEC's Test Centre in the Netherlands, a unique experience to view the spacecraft up close and meet with the engineering team which designed it.

Read more about the Hera mission here, more about the CubeSats joining Hera, with specific details of the Milani mission here.

You can enter the competition using this online form.

The deadline for submissions is : 29 February 2024.

Read the full terms and conditions for the Milani patch design contest here. Review ESA's brand guidelines here.