Passed with flying colours! 🔴 As Hera, our planetary defence mission zoomed just 5700 km above Mars, it did something none of our spacecraft has done before: it autonomously locked onto dozens of craters and surface features it had never seen before and tracked them, in real time. This wasn’t just for fun. It was a full-scale test of Hera’s autonomous navigation system, developed by companygmv in Spain and Romania, that will help the spacecraft steer itself around the tiny asteroid Dimorphos at the end of 2026 all on its own. The challenge? This feature-tracking tech had never been tested in space. But during a 20-minute activation near Mars, Hera began snapping a new image every 48 seconds — and successfully tracked brand-new landmarks without prior maps. Game-changer. Think of it like a spacecraft with the brains of a self-driving car spotting and following terrain in real time to work out where it is and where it’s headed. Plus, the Mars flyby wasn’t just a tech test. Hera cap...