Hot on the heels of Mercury changing its name back from Canada, I find out that Europe has signed an agreement to send a probe to the little planet.
Called BepiColombo, it’s a pretty ambitious mission. It will launch in 2013 and arrive at Mercury 6 years later, using a combination of — get this — planetary slingshots, chemical rockets, and an ion engine.
Cool.
There are two orbiters in this mission. One, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, will do the usual incredible imaging of the planet, including using wavelengths of light that allow a mineralogical study, and the other is the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter which will investigate Mercury’s magnetic field. The European Space Agency will build the imager, and Japan will handle the manetospheric observer.
You probably won’t hear too much about this mission for a while since it won’t even launch for several years, but when the time comes, it will probably improve our understanding of Mercury quite a bit, even over what MESSENGER will tell us. That’s always a good thing.
January 18th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Looks cool. Speaking of cool, I found out from a friend who works with some of the MESSENGER data that the eccentric orbit of it and part of Bepi is the planet’s albedo. Close orbits make the instruments so hot that they need to spend some time away from the planet to cool down.
January 18th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
BepiColombo mission has been under construction for several years already, it started well before MESSENGER in fact. The original mission consisted of three spacecraft, a European and a Japanese orbiter and a lander. The lander was canceled due to budged cuts.
The mission also led to the postponement of GAIA probe by a few years, something that I’m not ready to forgive.
Although Mercury is one of the most understudied planets, MESSENGER is already going to fix that. GAIA on the other hand is to measure accurately the positions of a billion (!) stars with unprecedented accuracy. Its results are expected to have a major impact on virtually all fields of astronomy, from Solar System sciences (asteroid positioning) to cosmology.
January 18th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
It’s excellent to see that Mercury is in the spotlight again, after 30 years of pretty much silence. Already MESSENGER has captured an image of something never before seen by human eyes – the ‘other side’ of Mercury, which we never see from Earth due to its orbit. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080116-mercury-first.html)
I think we can expect some startling discoveries from MESSENGER, and also from BepiColombo. Very cool indeed (well not so cool literally, but you know what I mean!)
January 18th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
[...] Europe to Mercury Hot on the heels of Mercury changing its name back from Canada, I find out that Europe has signed an agreement to send a probe to the little planet. Illustration of the BepiColombo mission, with two orbiters around Mercury … [...]
January 18th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I’d like to see it use Warp Drive. THAT would be cool!
January 18th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Excellent, as a resident of Europe, I love European missions. My particular favourite is the stealth mission which may or may not be orbiting the second planet from the Sun, and may or may not be doing worthwhile science.
January 18th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
When I was younger, Mercury was thought not to have ANY rotation, that it stayed tide-locked, keeping one face always to the Sun.
The mystery of Mercury’s unusually high density makes me wonder:
If the planet is mostly iron, like Earth’s and Venus’ cores, but has lost most of it’s crust, would that make any putative minerals closer to the surface, and easier to get to? Would a mining operation be profitable – sort of along the lines of mining the asteroids, with the benefit of not having to go hunting for them…
On another note – The name of this European probe is Bepi-Columbo…..What, no Peter Falk jokes yet??? Wake up people!!!
January 18th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Kullat Nunu beat me to my comments. Bepi Colombo has been in the pipeline for years now. I check the ESA website from time to time for updates.
After 30 years of not visiting Mercury, both missions are long overdue. After all the work in the 60s and early 70s, we kind of went into hibernation as far as interplanetary missions went. The US wasn’t doing much. The Soviets didn’t seem to be doing much. Europe, China, Japan and India weren’t up and running yet.
As to data from both MESSENGER and Bepi Colombo, the amount and quality will be phenomenal.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Sergeant Zim,
Even if Mercury’s minerals were strewn about, free for the picking, it’d still be less costly to just mine the same materials right here on Earth.
January 18th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Regarding Richard’s comment that part of Mercury is never seen from Earth because of the orbit, that’s not true. What he’s thinking of is the Mariner spacecraft, which had a period of about 2 Mercury years, and Mercury’s day is 3 Rotations for every 2 Mercury years, Mariner stumbled into a quirk that Mercury had the same sunlit face the 3 times it arrived.
It is unfortunate they had to cancel the lander. Would love to imagine what it’s like to walk on Mercury.
January 18th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
So when are we going to put a mining rover on the surface? Put it on on the nightside of the terminator just shy of the sunrise, and it gets a nice temperature to work in, trundling along at up to 3.63 km/h (at the equator), scooping up the surface minerals and refining them, launching them into space (probably using an electromagnetic mass driver). Oh, how enterprising.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:18 am
I’m thinking that Canada is just an easy target for those who can’t find it on a map, and to them “it might as well BE Mercury.”
Fortunately I can assure you that, looking outside right now, I don’t live on Mercury. I’m doubtful Mercury has any deposits of snow at any latitude on the surface. Er, that we know of, anyway. Our Solar System has revealed to us some strange things before.
January 19th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I seem to remember seeing in a documentary with Heather Cooper that for years astronomers thought that Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun, but in fact that turned out not to be true. Which is it?
January 19th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
jest,
It’s interesting you should bring that up. Some radar studies have returned data consistent with the presence of water, frozen in the basins of Mercury’s polar craters, just as on the Moon.
Crux,
Mercury is now known not to be tidally locked. It does have an interesting resonance between its day and its year, exactly 1.5 days per year.
January 20th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Well, it’s certainly inspired some poetic responses too:
http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2008/01/dueling-destinies.html
January 21st, 2008 at 6:48 am
Guys, Mercury IS tidally locked. It’s just that because of the high eccentricity of its orbit, it’s a 3:2 lock instead of a 1:1 lock. A planet the size of Mercury, other things being equal, should spin in somewhere between 10 and 30 hours.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:05 am
Yeah, what Barton Paul Levenson said.
Plus, also, some good background on Mercury here:
http://www.nineplanets.org/mercury.html
January 24th, 2008 at 6:48 am
[...] that we just hadn’t seen before, even up close. I’ve heard that now some Europeans even want in on the action. Not that it’s any of my business, but the more the merrier, if you ask [...]