BepiColombo's Path: Why Does It Take So Long to Get to Mercury?

BepiColombo's Path: Why Does It Take So Long to Get to Mercury?

BepiColombo's Path: Why Does It Take So Long to Get to Mercury?







The European and Japanese space agencies. they launched their first mission Mercury yesterday (October 19, October 20 GMT), but now, engineers and fans of the mission have to endure a wait of seven years before the science of the project It starts in earnest.



	

	the BepiColombo The mission has such a long cruise time because it is actually really difficult to successfully orbit our smaller planetary neighbor. It is so difficult that it took until 1985 before an engineer discovered some way to make the orbital trajectories work correctly.

		The problem arises because Mercury is very small and very close to the sun. That means it orbits the sun with incredible speed, and a spaceship that hopes to visit the innermost planet has to travel on a pedal with metal to reach the fast world. But there is a big problem: the severity of the sun will push the ship so hard to the star that a ship like BepiColombo really needs to slow down along its cruise to avoid it deviating from the course.

The[[BepiColombo in images: a mercury mission in Europe and Japan]





						


This graphic from the European Space Agency describes the way to Mercury for the BepiColombo spacecraft after its launch on October 19, 2018. The spacecraft will fly across Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury six times before entering orbit in December 2025.

            						    Credit: ESA 


		To face this dual challenge, BepiColombo drivers have carefully devised a combination of solar energy, chemical fuel and planetary overflights, which will work together to steer the ship through this race of celestial obstacles. In total, the ship will spend more energy than Pluto would try to reach, which resides near the edge of the solar system. But those planetary overflights will take the cruise time of BepiColombo to a total of just over seven years. 

		The series of overflights of the mission, one from Earth in April 2020, two from Venus in 2020 and 2021 and six from Mercury between 2021 and 2025, will each modify the orbit of the spacecraft, bringing it closer to the mission. . objective. These flybys will also give engineers the opportunity to make sure that many of the instruments on board BepiColombo are working as they should, since more than half of them will be on.

		Then, in December 2025, BepiColombo will slide into orbit around the small planet. Once the probe does, it will split into the two scientific spacecraft that are currently joined for the long journey: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter of Europe (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter of Japan (MMO). Those two spaceships will fly in complementary orbits, with the MPO that rotates around the planet every 2.3 hours and the MMO does it every 9.3 hours.

		If everything goes according to the scientists' plans, those careful turns will allow the 16 instruments that make up BepiColombo to collect a large amount of data on how to raise the eyebrow. small, strange mercury And how it came to be our entire solar system.



	Email Meghan Bartels in mbartels@space.com or follow it @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom Y Facebook. Original article about Space.com.

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