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The European and Japanese space agencies launched their first mission in Mercure yesterday (19 October, 20 October GMT), but the engineers and admirers of the mission have to endure a wait of seven years before the project starts seriously.
BepiColombo's mission has such a long cruising time because it is actually very difficult to succeed in orbiting our smallest planetary neighbor. It's so difficult that it was not until 1985 that an engineer found a way to ensure that orbital trajectories function properly.
The problem arises because Mercury is so small and so close to the sun. This means that it is spinning around the sun with incredible speed, and that a spaceship that hopes to visit the deepest planet in the world must travel the pedal to catch the fast world. But there is a big problem: the gravity of the sun will pull the spaceship so strongly toward the star that a craft like BepiColombo must actually brake throughout its cruise to avoid getting drifted. [BepiColombo in Pictures: A Mercury Mission by Europe and Japan]
This European Space Agency graph describes the path to Mercury for the space shuttle BepiColombo after its launch on 19 October 2018. The space shuttle will fly once Earth, twice that of Mercury and six times before entering orbit. in December 2025. Credit: ESA
In order to meet this dual challenge, the BepiColombo pilots have carefully developed a combination of solar energy, chemical fuel and planetary flyovers, which will work together to steer the spacecraft through this celestial fighter course. In total, the spacecraft will spend more energy than it would to reach Pluto, which is near the edge of the solar system. But these planetary flyovers will take BepiColombo's cruising time to just over seven years.
The series of mission flyovers – one from the Earth in April 2020, two from Venus in 2020 and 2021 and six from Mercury itself between 2021 and 2025 – will slightly alter the orbit of the Earth. spacecraft to bring it closer to the mission. target. These flybys will also help engineers to ensure that many of the instruments on board BepiColombo are working properly, as more than half of them will be on.
Then, in December 2025, BepiColombo will go into orbit around the tiny planet. Once the spacecraft has done this, it will separate into two scientific spacecraft that are currently reunited for the long run: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Japanese Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). These two spacecraft will fly in complementary orbits, with DFO circling the planet every 2.3 hours and the MMO every 9.3 hours.
If all goes as planned by the scientists, these neat twirls will allow the 16 instruments that make up BepiColombo to gather a lot of data on the eyebrow on the tiny and strange Mercury and on the functioning of our solar system.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her. @meghanbartels. follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.
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