PARIS: On the way to investigate the scene of a historic asteroid collision, a European spacecraft swung by Mars and captured rare images of the red planet´s mysterious small moon Deimos, the European Space Agency said on Thursday.

Europe´s HERA mission is aiming to find out how much of an impact a Nasa spacecraft made when it deliberately smashed into an asteroid in 2022 in the first-ever test of our planetary defences.

But HERA will not reach the asteroid — which is 11 million kilometres from Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — until late 2026. On the long voyage there, the spacecraft received a gravity boost by slingshotting around Mars on Wednesday. For an hour, it flew as close as 5,600-kms from the Martian surface, at a speed of 33,480-kms an hour.