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The Ariane 5 vehicle on the launching pad at Kourou, French Guiana, with its BepiColombo payload.
ESA
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The mission includes two spacecraft: the mercury planetary orbiter and the magnetospheric mercury orbiter.
ESA
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BepiColombo is a joint mission of ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), conducted under the direction of ESA.
ESA
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Here, the BepiColombo spacecraft stack is being hoisted inside the final assembly building, for mounting on the Ariane 5 launcher.
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The space shuttle and the rocket are routed to the launch pad.
ESA
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View of the payload fairing, with the landscape of French Guiana in the background.
ESA
One might think that it is relatively easy to reach Mercury, the deepest planet in the solar system. At its closest approach, Mercury is only 77 million kilometers from the Earth, barely more than the nearest point of the Earth on Mars. The Earth-Mars transit usually takes only about six months.
However, the enormous gravity of the Sun makes the orbit of a spaceship around Mercury quite difficult. How serious are we talking about? The force g at the surface of the Earth is 9.8 meters / second ^ 2. In comparison, the gravity of the Sun is almost 30 times greater, at 274 m / s ^ 2.
To overcome this gravity, a mission to reach a stable orbit around the tiny planet of Mercury (with a gravity of just 3.7 m / s ^ 2) therefore requires a tremendous amount of energy, or more than sending a probe to Pluto. . During such a mission, a spacecraft must accumulate energy to resist the gravitational pull of the Sun and glide into orbit around Mercury.
ESA
The European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission, which starts Friday night in Kourou, French Guiana, will carry not one but two orbiters in this small gray world. And although the Ariane 5 rocket is one of the most powerful launchers in the world, it will take another seven years to enter orbit around Mercury and not the Sun. Meanwhile, the spacecraft will fly over the Earth, two from Venus and six from Mercury before finally reaching its destination.
Science at Mercury
It is only in March 2026 that the scientific activities will really begin around the planet Mercury. BepiColombo is the first European mission on the planet. It is intended to follow NASA's spaceship messenger who spent from 2011 to 2015 at Mercure and studied chemistry, geology and the magnetic field.
BepiColombo, named after Italian scientist Giuseppe "Bepi" of the 20th century, who studied the planet Mercury, is a European-built spacecraft that will transport the Mercury planetary orbits of the European and Japanese Space Agency, which will be placed in their orbit. final. will bring them back to a few hundred kilometers from the surface of the planet.
ESA
On the whole, the orbiters will study a number of important scientific questions, including the formation of the planet Mercury in a stable orbit so close to the Sun. For example, Messenger found that Mercury's radius had been reduced by about 7 km as a result of the cooling of the interior of the planet. BepiColombo will image the planet at a higher resolution and attempt to improve the scientific understanding of the cooling of a planet without plate tectonics. You will find more information about orbits and their scientific goals in the mission's press kit.
The spacecraft and its orbiters are also equipped with technologies such as a sun visor and a multilayer insulation to withstand temperatures ranging from -100 ° C to 450 ° Celsius. European engineers plan to use the knowledge gained through the exploitation of BepiColombo to develop a future mission to study the Sun.
Arianespace, Europe's leading launch company, has already transferred the Ariane 5 rocket and payload to a launch pad in South America. The launch time is set at 21:45 ET on Friday (01:45 UTC on Saturday). A livestream of the launch will begin approximately 30 minutes before the scheduled time of takeoff.
Image of announcement by ESA
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