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artist's rendering featuring the planet's smallest solar system
ESA's BepiColombo mission started this weekend towards Mercury, but it's not the first spacecraft to explore the small planet closest to the sun.
The first, Mariner 10, overtook Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975 for a gravity assist test that would later help propel the Voyager (and finally Galileo and Cassini) probes to the outdoor solar system. While Mariner 10 was sweeping Venus, the gravity of the planet pushed the spacecraft into an orbit that would take it closer to the Sun. In this orbit, Mariner 10 swept Mercury in March 1974 for mankind to examine for the first time the innermost planet (in space, of course, near is a relative term which in this case represents about 700 km). At the time, we knew so little about Mercury that NASA engineers had to base their orbital calculations on rough estimates of the actual mass of the planet.
On September 21, 1974, Mariner returned to Mercury a much farther distance of 48,000 kilometers. On March 16, 1975, he then made a last tight pass about 330 km. During these three passages, the cameras of the probe took 2800 photos of the rocky surface and crater. At the same time, an ultraviolet spectrometer looked for signs of the atmosphere and detected one, a thin layer of helium for the most part, hanging on the planet away from its magnetic field. An onboard plasma detector on the shuttle tracked the interactions between the solar wind and the Mercury magnetic field and the magnetometer readings, allowing scientists to better understand the inner workings of Mercury. In particular, he confirmed the presence of a large iron core in the heart of the planet. And by measuring the infrared radiation of the rock surface, scientists have calculated the ground temperature and the amount of heat returned by the mercury in the space. This, in turn, gave some clues to the composition of the surface of Mercury.
Today, Mariner 10 is probably still drifting around the Sun, almost crossing Mercury once in an orbit, unless it hits an asteroid or is deflected by the gravity of something. bigger. But no one has seen or heard the probe since March 24, 1975, just a week after its last visit. It was then that the maneuver gas from the probe's nitrogen was finally exhausted and that NASA turned off the transmitter and turned to the mountains of data that Mariner 10 had sent home.
Mercury Messenger
Finally, this data helped to plan a return mission to Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft reached Mercury in March 2011 after more than six years of slingshot maneuvering through the internal solar system, and did something that no spacecraft had done before: he has actually entered the orbit of Mercury. And there he stayed for four years.
Messenger mapped the entire surface of the planet at a resolution of 250 km per pixel, zooming in on the most interesting areas of the extraterrestrial landscape at a resolution of 20 to 50 km per pixel. These images, combined with a laser altimeter, gave scientists back home on Earth a detailed model of the inhospitable terrain of Mercury. With his more modern cameras, Messenger was carrying three spectrometers to study the composition of the healed and scarred Mercury surface in different spectra, as well as others to study the composition of its thin atmosphere and even the energetic particles in its magnetosphere. A radio instrument measured slight changes in Messenger's trajectory during its orbit around the rocky planet, which scientists used to get more details on Mercury's severity.
And Messenger discovered something completely unexpected in the next world of the Sun: the ice. The frozen water lies in the cool darkness of some of Mercury's deepest craters, whose walls are so high and so steep that parts of their floors remain in permanent shadow. In early 2015, during the last weeks of the mission, when operators felt that they had little to lose, Messenger's orbit dangerously swept the surface of Mercury to give its spectrometers a better overview of his surprising discovery.
In the end, of course, Messenger's maneuvering fuel ran out and the spaceship eventually succumbed to Mercury's gravity. He crashed on April 30, 2015, somewhere on the opposite side of the planet, far from the planet, where his operators could not hear him die. The spaceship simply bypassed the curve of the planet and never resurfaced.
A new mission on the way
BepiColombo can give us another glimpse of what's left of Messenger and the dead spaceship can still teach us something about Mercury. The solar wind, cosmic radiation and tiny pieces of rock and dust called micrometeorites cause slow wear of materials exposed in space – or on the surface of planets like Mercury, whose thin atmosphere leaves the surface relatively exposed what scientists call spatial alteration. Since we know exactly how long Messenger has been on the surface of Mercury, the images returned by BepiColombo at home can help us understand the aging rate of space by Mercury. This reveals new details about the environment in one of the less well understood worlds of our solar system, but it can also help in the design of structures and materials for future spacecraft – or possibly , to a crew mission on Mars.
And if things had happened differently, Messenger might not have been alone on the surface of Mercury. The initial design of the mission included a disk-shaped lander called a mercury surface element, which would have brought a set of instruments, a soil sensor and an adorable micro-mobile to the surface. But ESA canceled the financing of the LG in 2005.
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artist's rendering featuring the planet's smallest solar system
ESA's BepiColombo mission started this weekend towards Mercury, but it's not the first spacecraft to explore the small planet closest to the sun.
The first, Mariner 10, overtook Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975 for a gravity assist test that would later help propel the Voyager (and finally Galileo and Cassini) probes to the outdoor solar system. While Mariner 10 was sweeping Venus, the gravity of the planet pushed the spacecraft into an orbit that would take it closer to the Sun. In this orbit, Mariner 10 swept Mercury in March 1974 for mankind to examine for the first time the innermost planet (in space, of course, near is a relative term which in this case represents about 700 km). At the time, we knew so little about Mercury that NASA engineers had to base their orbital calculations on rough estimates of the actual mass of the planet.
On September 21, 1974, Mariner returned to Mercury a much farther distance of 48,000 kilometers. On March 16, 1975, he then made a last tight pass about 330 km. During these three passages, the cameras of the probe took 2800 photos of the rocky surface and crater. At the same time, an ultraviolet spectrometer looked for signs of the atmosphere and detected one, a thin layer of helium for the most part, hanging on the planet away from its magnetic field. An onboard plasma detector on the shuttle tracked the interactions between the solar wind and the Mercury magnetic field and the magnetometer readings, allowing scientists to better understand the inner workings of Mercury. In particular, he confirmed the presence of a large iron core in the heart of the planet. And by measuring the infrared radiation of the rock surface, scientists have calculated the ground temperature and the amount of heat returned by the mercury in the space. This, in turn, gave some clues to the composition of the surface of Mercury.
Today, Mariner 10 is probably still drifting around the Sun, almost crossing Mercury once in an orbit, unless it hits an asteroid or is deflected by the gravity of something. bigger. But no one has seen or heard the probe since March 24, 1975, just a week after its last visit. It was then that the maneuver gas from the probe's nitrogen was finally exhausted and that NASA turned off the transmitter and turned to the mountains of data that Mariner 10 had sent home.
Mercury Messenger
Finally, this data helped to plan a return mission to Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft reached Mercury in March 2011 after more than six years of slingshot maneuvering through the internal solar system, and did something that no spacecraft had done before: he has actually entered the orbit of Mercury. And there he stayed for four years.
Messenger mapped the entire surface of the planet at a resolution of 250 km per pixel, zooming in on the most interesting areas of the extraterrestrial landscape at a resolution of 20 to 50 km per pixel. These images, combined with a laser altimeter, gave scientists back home on Earth a detailed model of the inhospitable terrain of Mercury. With his more modern cameras, Messenger was carrying three spectrometers to study the composition of the healed and scarred Mercury surface in different spectra, as well as others to study the composition of its thin atmosphere and even the energetic particles in its magnetosphere. A radio instrument measured slight changes in Messenger's trajectory during its orbit around the rocky planet, which scientists used to get more details on Mercury's severity.
And Messenger discovered something completely unexpected in the next world of the Sun: the ice. The frozen water lies in the cool darkness of some of Mercury's deepest craters, whose walls are so high and so steep that parts of their soils remain in a permanent shadow. In early 2015, during the last weeks of the mission, when operators felt that they had little to lose, Messenger's orbit dangerously swept the surface of Mercury to give its spectrometers a better overview of his surprising discovery.
In the end, of course, Messenger's maneuvering fuel ran out and the spaceship eventually succumbed to Mercury's gravity. He crashed on April 30, 2015, somewhere on the opposite side of the planet, far from the planet, where his operators could not hear him die. The spaceship simply bypassed the curve of the planet and never resurfaced.
A new mission on the way
BepiColombo can give us another glimpse of what's left of Messenger and the dead spaceship can still teach us something about Mercury. The solar wind, cosmic radiation and tiny pieces of rock and dust called micrometeorites cause slow wear of materials exposed in space – or on the surface of planets like Mercury, whose thin atmosphere leaves the surface relatively exposed what scientists call spatial alteration. Since we know exactly how long Messenger has been on the surface of Mercury, the images returned by BepiColombo at home can help us understand the aging rate of space by Mercury. This reveals new details about the environment in one of the less well understood worlds of our solar system, but it can also help in the design of structures and materials for future spacecraft – or possibly , to a crew mission on Mars.
And if things had happened differently, Messenger might not have been alone on the surface of Mercury. The initial design of the mission included a disk-shaped lander called a mercury surface element, which would have brought a set of instruments, a soil sensor and an adorable micro-mobile to the surface. But ESA canceled the financing of the LG in 2005.
