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Two European and Japanese spacecraft co-produced the first stunning close-up images of Mercury via a weekend flyby. Mercury was all covered with craters, revealing a world of scorched rocks.
Two connected probes, called Bepicolombo, took the first image of Mercury while approaching the planet on a Mercury flyby on October 1. Bepi Colombo will need to slow down to enter orbit around Mercury in 2025, the first of six flybys to enter orbit.
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Bepi Colombo took the first official photo of Mercury at 7:44 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the spacecraft was about 2418 km away from the planet at the time, so it was photographed with a black-and-white navigation camera (Mercury Surface Probe Orbiter Monitoring Camera 2). At 7:34 PM, ten minutes earlier, Bepicolombo was closest to Mercury, within 200 km.
Bepicolombo’s image clearly shows dozens of craters covering Mercury’s surface, as well as camera cradles, thrusters and spacecraft structures.
An ESA official added the following description to the photo. “The marked area is part of Mercury’s northern hemisphere, including the lava-inundated Sihtu Plain. A softer, brighter, rounded area is characteristic of the plain around Calvino Crater called the Rudaki Plain. Lermontov Crater 166 km wide is also visible. “It looks bright because it contains a unique feature of Mercury called ‘hollows’ where volatile elements escape into space. It also contains vents from which volcanic eruptions occurred.”
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ESA also released descriptive images identifying the major Mercury craters in the images of Bepicolombo, along with the original photos. More photos are expected to be released in the future as the Bepicolombo science team processes them.
The $750 million Bepicolombo mission consists of two different orbiters designed to study Mercury in unprecedented detail. The part ESA is responsible for is the Mercury Surface Exploration Orbiter (MTM) to study the surface of Mercury, and the Mercury Magnetosphere Exploration Orbiter (MMO) manufactured by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) studies the planet’s magnetic field and plasma environment. do.
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The two orbiters were launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from the French Guiana Space Center in October 2018. The name Bepi Colombo is named after Giuseppe Befi Colombo (1920–84), an Italian scientist who developed navigation for space probes. So far, Bepicolombo has successfully performed four flybys to the three planets.
Five Mercury flybys will be performed before entering Mercury’s orbit in 2025, with the next flybys scheduled for June 20, 2022, June 2023, September and December 2024, and January 2025. If all goes well, it is expected to enter Mercury’s orbit on December 5, 2025. The future mission schedule is as follows.
March 14, 2026: MPO’s last orbit
May 1, 2027: Nominal Exploration Ends
May 1, 2028: Expansion ends
By Kwon Yoon-hee, staff reporter heeya@seoul.co.kr
