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Posted: 24th October 2018 3:27:05
Bepi wants to know more about Mercury, which "does not really correspond to our theories about the formation of the solar system. (Image: NASA)
Two satellites developed in Europe and Japan are en route to the planet Mercury, closest to the Sun, Mercury. It will probably take them seven years to reach their destination. The BepiColombo joint venture left Earth with an Ariane rocket launched Friday in South America, the BBC announced. The probes were cleared from the Kourou spaceport on the Atlantic coast of French Guiana at 10:45 pm on Friday.
Mission controllers based in Darmstadt, Germany, would spend much of the day on Saturday talking about the probe to confirm they were properly configured for the long cruise ahead. As Bepi moves closer to NASA's solar probe Solar Probe launched in August, his goal is to learn more about Mercury, which "does not really fit our theories about solar system formation," said Professor Dave Rothery, scientist at Bepi. Open University of the United Kingdom.
"We can not fully understand our planet if we are not able to explain the mercury whose iron core is oversized – 60% of its mass," Rothery said.
Science has not yet explained why the planet only has a thin coating of rocks. Bepi's high resolution data should bring us closer to an answer, the BBC reported. This is the first time European and Japanese space agencies (Esa and Jaxa) have signed up for Mercury. The Americans have been there already, briefly with the Mariner 10 probe in the 1970s and with the Messenger orbiter at the beginning of this decade. Messenger discovered that ice was in some of Mercury's shaded craters and that the crust contained a lot of graphite (pencil lead). Bepi will build on these. The new mission features twice as many instruments and will come closer.
The dense body of Mercury does not reflect its original form. It is possible that the planet started life a lot further and then migrated inward, said scientist Suzie Imber mission of the University of Leicester.
"It's also a huge cliff of several kilometers. And these cliffs formed when Mercury narrowed. We call them wrinkles, "said Imber.
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It's possible to reach Mercury directly in just a few months, but the speed of a spacecraft falling into the deep gravity of the Sun makes it very difficult to stop on the planet. BBC report says. Bepi will take a more circuitous route. It will fly beyond the Earth, Venus and Mercury itself, using the weight of their gravity to empty its speed, so that the mission can position itself gently before 2025. The most difficult prospect to coming is the heat. At only 58 million kilometers from the Sun, working at Mercury, it's like being in a pizza oven, Imber said.
The sides of the probes exposed to direct sunlight will have to deal with temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius. Even surfaces facing the sun must be protected. The coping strategies include covering the MMO with thick blankets made of titanium and ceramic insulating material. "The environment is extremely hostile," says Elsa Montagnon, mission controller at Esa.
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"On mercury, we have 10 times the solar energy we receive on Earth. But on the bright side of Mercury, we get about four times what we get on Earth. So, spaceships are continually in a thermal sandwich, "said Montagnon.
The mission is expensive. The costs borne by the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency amount to approximately 1.65 billion euros. In addition, national space agencies in Europe have paid for instrumentation on the MMO, bringing the overall budget to more than € 3 billion. This issue covers the entire life cycle of the mission, from its approval (2007) to its end (end of 2020). Engineers had a hard time developing technologies to protect Bepi as close to the sun as possible. Delays continued to increase the price.
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