BepiColombo mission

BepiColombo mission

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – European-Japanese Space Mission Gets First Glimpse of Mercury

Concept –

• A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system’s innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025.
• The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34 p.m. GMT Friday, using the planet’s gravity to slow the spacecraft down.
• After swooping past Mercury at altitudes of under 200 kilometers (125 miles), the spacecraft took a low-resolution black-and-white photo with one of its monitoring cameras before zipping off again.
• The European Space Agency said the captured image shows the Northern Hemisphere and Mercury’s characteristic pock-marked features, among them the 166-kilometer-wide (103-mile-wide) Lermontov crater.
• It is the first mission by the European and Japanese Space agency to Mercury.
• The joint mission by the European agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice past Venus on its journey to the solar system’s smallest planet.
• It is also the first mission to send two spacecraft to make complementary measurements of the planet and its environment at the same time.
  • The spacecraft are ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or ‘Mio’).
• The ESA-built Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) will carry the orbiters to Mercury using a combination of solar electric propulsion and gravity assisted flybys.
• The mission is named after Italian scientist Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, who is credited with helping develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA’s Mariner 10 first used when it flew to Mercury in 1974.
• The two orbiters will also collect data at Venus.
• The challenges to the mission include:
  • Sun’s gravity makes it difficult to place a spacecraft into a stable orbit around the mercury.
  • The spacecraft also have to face extreme temperatures and solar radiations.
• With this mission researchers are hoping to learn about the formation of planets and the solar system.
• Past Missions to Mercury:
  • Mariner 10 – NASA Flyby Mission (Flyby is a path spacecraft follows past a planet or other body in space) to Venus and Mercury (1973)
  • MESSENGER – NASA Orbiter to Mercury (2004)