The BepiColombo probe has passed vibration tests and is preparing for launch, and ESA has revealed details of its mission to Mercury.
For almost 10 years now, the European (ESA) and Japanese (JAXA) space agencies have been working on a joint BepiColombo mission, which is to travel to Mercury in 2018. The device recently passed final tests before the final prelaunch assembly. Summing up, ESA organized a briefing at which engineers and scientists revealed new details of the upcoming flight and scientific work.
Mercury remains one of the least studied planets in the solar system, although it is not at all as far away (about 77 million km) as, for example, Saturn. The scorching proximity greatly complicates the operation of spacecraft, so so far, only two American probes, Mariner-10 and Messenger, have examined Mercury. The work of the latter brought a lot of interesting discoveries and mysteries. The new mission of ESA and JAXA will be able to solve some of them: unlike the previous ones, the device should even land on the surface of the planet.
BepiColombo will have to slow down in advance, which has made its flight path much more difficult. According to ESA developers, the probe will fly around the Earth, two flyby around Venus and six more around Mercury itself, before finally converging with it. The long journey will take more than seven years and will end in 2025. Already in orbit of Mercury, BepiColombo will split into two independent vehicles, European and Japanese, which will begin research. The Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) satellite and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) magnetosphere explorer will separate from the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM). The IMO is made by JAXA, and the rest of the mission elements - plus the three-meter MOSIF sunscreen - are European partners.
BepiColombo "assembled": at the bottom on a conical base - MTM module; it contains the orbital module MPO, even higher - the magnetosphere researcher MMO. On the right side of the floor is the MOSIF / & copy; ESA-C sun shield. Carreau / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
At the site of BepiColombo, extreme temperature fluctuations await, which can vary during the day from –170 to 430 ° С, plus powerful streams of radiation from the Sun. According to one of the mission's developers, Ulrich Reininghaus, for the spacecraft "it's like working in a pizza oven." At the same time, MPO will operate in a weakly elongated polar orbit of Mercury and explore its surface and internal structure; The IMO will move in a highly elliptical polar orbit and measure the planet's global magnetic field.
The main question, which scientists hope to answer thanks to the BepiColombo data, remains the nature of the geological activity of Mercury. Messenger showed that the planet is still shrinking slightly in size, possibly due to the still continuing cooling of the core, and geophysicists hope to understand why and how this happens. The deposits of "eternal" ice in the shadows at the bottom of deep craters and volcanoes, which Messenger noticed, also need confirmation. Finally, the proximity of the Sun with its powerful gravity will allow one more time and with particular accuracy to check some of the consequences of the General theory of relativity.
Sergey Vasiliev
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