Euro-Japanese ship BepiColombo successfully launches its seven-year Mercury trip

The BepiColombo space mission in Europe and Japan was successfully launched with the aim of exploring Mercury, the closest to the Sun, the smallest and most unexplored planet in our solar system. The new mission will study the surface, the atmosphere and the magnetic field of the planet.

It is a joint venture of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), the third mission ever organized at Mercure and the first European mission.

This represented the $ 450 million cost of the US Space Agency's (NASA) courier, orbiting the planet between 2011 and 2015, before collapsing to the surface in the event of a gasoline outage. . Previously, NASA's Mariner 10 had made three short pbades from Mercury in 1974-1975.

BepiColombo, at a cost of 1.65 billion euros, was launched Saturday at 04:45 GMT from the European Space Station in Kourou, French Guiana, on a European missile Ariane 5. The mission is named after of the Italian astrophysicist Giuseppe "Bepp" Colombo, who had studied Mercury during the Mariner mission.

The mission includes two ships: a larger European with 11 scientific instruments and cameras (Mercury Planetary Orbiter-MPO or Bepi) and a smaller Japanese with five instruments (Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter-MMO or Mio), both put into Mercury's orbit. , completing the remarks of the other.

The voyage to Mercury will last seven years and, if all goes well, the ship, which has reached a speed of 60 km / s, should be in orbit in 2025. The enormous attraction of the Sun will be a challenge. which makes it very difficult to place a space device on a fixed orbit around nearby Mercury. We also needed to develop new technologies to better protect both spacecraft from the radiation and heat of our parent star reaching 5,500 degrees Celsius.

Among other things, the Euro-Japanese mission will offer new evidence on various mysteries of Mercury, such as its asymmetric magnetic field (much more powerful to the north), its oversized core of mostly melted iron (occupying up to 80% of the radius of the planet), strange geological precipitations such as lakes on its surface (depths of several tens of meters and widths of several hundreds), as well as the abundance of volatile chemical elements (chlorine, sulfur, potbadium, sodium , etc.), had previously disappeared under the influence of the sun, so they are probably constantly recreated from the basement of the planet.