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The BepiColombo spacecraft finally reached Mercury after 3 years of travel. The first photos are incredible but the mission is for more.
Incredible new photographs of Mercury have flooded the press of the joint Euro-Japanese mission BepiColombo. The spacecraft was launched in 2018 and is running for seven years space out journey to explore the planet closest to the Sun. NASA’s Mariner 10 mission visited Mercury in 1974 and 1975, then the Messenger spacecraft returned to the planet in 2014 as part of NASA’s solar exploration program.
Mercury is one of the least explored planets in our solar system. For decades, Mercury was only seen as a rocky planet, smaller than our Moon, devoid of life and interest. However, the new European and Japanese mission says there is much more to Mercury than what is seen.
On October 1, after 3 full years of space travel, the BepiColombo spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury. The craft flew over the planet for a gravitational assist maneuver and took pictures while it was 2,418 kilometers from Mercury. A few hours later, it rolled over for its closest approach just 199 kilometers from its surface. The first images taken by the mission focused on Mercury’s northern hemisphere, areas flooded with lava, smoother and brighter plains, and famous craters like the Calvino crater and the 166-kilometer-wide Lermontov crater, adding to mankind’s collection of stunning space photos.
The elusive Mercury and its mysteries
One of the reasons Mercury has not been fully explored is its speed and the complex maneuvers required for a spacecraft to enter orbit. Being the closest planet to the Sun, it is moving at 105,947 miles per hour. Mercury travels so fast that it completes a complete orbit around the Sun, which the Earth completes in 365 days, in just 88 days. The BepiColombo mission has planned 9 gravitational overflights, four of which have already taken place. The craft is designed to accelerate overflights on Earth and by the weather of Venus, and six times it will cross Mercury to finally do it correctly and move towards its orbit in 2025. But, Europe and Japan have not planned this delicate trip just to take amazing pictures.
ESA says they will unravel the mysteries of Mercury. The mission wants to prove or disprove a theory that Mercury initially formed near Mars and was pushed closer to the Sun by a massive Armageddon collision that threw out most of its crust and, during its journey, has affected our own planet and our Moon. This theory would explain the strong presence of potassium which evaporates over time in the planets closest to the Sun, why NASA saw water in its poles, and why Mercury is the only rocky planet in our solar system, besides the Earth, which has a magnetic field. As BepiColombo continues on its course, progressing in its mission to solve the mysteries of the solar system, accelerating near Mercury where the size of the Sun has tripled, we should expect it to give us more than just amazing photos.
Source: European Space Agency.
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