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 (ESA) said Thursday.

For an hour, HERA flew as close as 5,600 kilometers from the Martian surface, at a speed of 33,480 kilometers an hour. It used the opportunity to test some of its scientific instruments, snapping around 600 pictures, including rare ones of Deimos.

A mission to survey the results of a deliberate crash between an asteroid and a NASA spacecraft has taken stunning images of Mars and its moon Deimos