[ad_1]
A British-built spacecraft is about to take off from the Earth bound for Mercury, the burning planet closest to the sun.
BepiColombo, the first mission of the European Space Agency (Esa) to Mercury, will send two probes to explore the planet, where surface temperatures reach 450 ° C.
The four-ton spacecraft will launch into orbit by the Ariane 5 rocket at the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on 20 October.
It will then take 5.2 billion kilometers (8.5 billion kilometers) to reach its destination by 2025.
NASA's Messenger probe launched Mercury from 2011 to 2015, taking photos of the surface
The spacecraft will then deploy the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), built by satellite builder Airbus Space and Defense at its Stevenage assembly center in Herts, to study the surface and composition of Mercury.
The second probe, the Japanese Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO), built in Japan, will focus on the electromagnetic environment that surrounds the planet.
A key instrument of DFO, the Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (Mixs), was developed and built at the University of Leicester.
The 13 kg (28 lb) long camera includes two X-ray telescopes, one designed to capture images of the surface and the other to analyze its composition.
How BepiColombo should be in cruise mode on its way to Mercury
The mercury is bombarded with high energy sub-atomic particles from the sun, which causes the "fluorescence" of the surface and the emission of X-rays. The ray analysis provides information about the composition of the planet.
Professor Emma Bunce, a scientist at Mixs, said, "We want to understand how the solar system works and how it was formed.
"Mercury is a place of extremes, a small planet and the planet closest to the sun, and knowing how it has survived will help us to reconstruct a larger image of the solar system and the place we occupy in the world. inside of it. "
Unlike all other interplanetary spaceships in history, BepiColombo is equipped with a futuristic ion electric propulsion, also designed and built in the UK.
Four ion engines provided by the British technology and defense company QinetiQ were mounted on the power unit of the device, the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM).
They work by "ionizing" an inert xenon gas – removing an electron from the gas atoms to give them a positive charge.
The resulting "plasma" is attracted by the electrostatic forces to a grid with an opposite negative charge and is expelled from the propeller at 90,000 mph.
Mission Controllers at the European Space Center in Darmstadt, Germany, prepare for the launch of BepiColombo
Unusually, the spacecraft will use energy not to accelerate, but to brake when it "falls" to the sun.
It will accomplish this by both moving the ionic thrusters in the direction of travel and by performing a complex series of gravitational-assisted overflights beyond Earth, Venus and Mercury.
Jerry Bolter, project manager at Airbus Defense and Space where the MTM was assembled, said: "We recognized early on that for BepiColumbo to do what we wanted and get from here to Mercury, we needed a Very efficient propulsion If we used chemical propulsion, we would need 17 tons of propellant.
"The ion drive only needs 581 kilograms of propellant and represents the equivalent of 17.8 million miles per gallon."
Only two spacecraft have visited Mercury. NASA's Mariner 10 satellite flew over the planet three times in 1974-1975 and the US Space Agency's Messenger probe orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 to take pictures of the surface.
Source link
