|
|
Europe-Japan joint mission set out for Mercury
|
|
|
|
Top Stories |
|
|
|
|
IANS | 20 Oct, 2018
Two satellites developed in
Europe and Japan are on their way to the Sun's closest planet Mercury.
It is likely to take them seven years to reach their destination.
The joint endeavour BepiColombo left Earth on an Ariane rocket that launched out of South America on Friday, the BBC said.
The probes lifted clear of the Kourou spaceport in Atlantic coast of French Guiana at 10.45 p.m. on Friday.
Mission
controllers based in Darmstadt, Germany, would spend much of Saturday
talking to the spacecraft, to confirm they were properly configured for
the long cruise ahead.
Coming close on the heels of NASA's Parker
Solar Probe that was launched in August, Bepi is aimed at finding more
about Mercury that "doesn't really fit with our theories for how the
Solar System formed", said Bepi scientist Professor Dave Rothery from
the UK's Open University.
"We can't understand our planet fully
unless we're able to explain Mercury that has an oversized iron core --
60 per cent of its mass," Rothery said.
Science has not yet
explained why the planet only has a thin veneer of rocks. Bepi's
high-resolution data should bring us nearer to an answer, the BBC
reported.
It's the first time the European and Japanese space
agencies (Esa and Jaxa) have set out for Mercury. The Americans have
already been there, briefly with the Mariner 10 probe in the 1970s, and
with the Messenger orbiter earlier this decade.
Messenger
discovered that water-ice is held inside some of Mercury's shadowed
craters, and that its crust contains a lot of graphite (pencil lead).
Bepi will build on those. The new mission carries twice as much instrumentation and will get closer for longer.
Mercury's
dense body does not reflect its initial form. It's possible the planet
began life much further and later migrated inwards, mission scientist
Suzie Imber from Leicester University.
"It's also got huge
cliffs, many kilometres tall. And those cliffs formed as Mercury shrank.
We call them wrinkle ridges," Imber said.
It is possible to
directly reach Mercury in a matter of months, but the speed picked up by
a spacecraft falling into the Sun's deep gravity would make it very
hard to stop at the planet, the BBC report said.
Bepi will take a
more circuitous route. It will fly past Earth, Venus and Mercury
itself, using the tug of their gravity to bleed off speed, so that by
2025 the mission can gently slot into position.
The toughest
prospect ahead is the heat. At just 58 million km from the Sun, working
at Mercury is like being in a pizza oven, Imber said.
The sides
of the probes in direct sunlight will have to cope with temperatures
over 400 degrees Celsius. Even those surfaces facing away from the Sun
have to be protected.
Coping strategies include covering the MMO
in thick blankets of insulation material made from titanium and
ceramics. "The environment is extremely hostile," explains Esa mission
controller Elsa Montagnon.
"On Mercury, we get 10 times the
solar energy we get on Earth. But then from the illuminated side of
Mercury, we get about four times what we get on the Earth. So, the
spacecraft are continually in a heat sandwich," Montagnon said.
The
mission is an expensive one. It's estimated the costs borne by the
European Space Agency and the Japanese space agency amount to about 1.65
billion euros.
Additionally, national space agencies in Europe
have paid for the instrumentation on the MMO, taking the overall budget
above 3 billion euros.
This number covers the full lifecycle of the mission, from its approval (2007) to its termination (late 2020s).
Engineers
have had a torrid time developing the technologies to keep Bepi safe so
close to the Sun. Delays have kept on adding to the price.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Customs Exchange Rates |
Currency |
Import |
Export |
US Dollar
|
66.20
|
64.50 |
UK Pound
|
87.50
|
84.65 |
Euro
|
78.25
|
75.65 |
Japanese
Yen |
58.85 |
56.85 |
As on 13 Aug, 2022 |
|
|
Daily Poll |
|
|
PM Modi's recent US visit to redefine India-US bilateral relations |
|
|
|
|
|
Commented Stories |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|