The Mercury-bound probe BepiColombo has taken its second look at its target plane today during a super-close bypass designed to slow down the spacecraft and adjust its trajectory.
BepiColombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The mission, consisting of two orbiters traveling to Mercury stacked on top of each other, launched in orbit around the sun 2018. Since then, ground controllers have adjusted the orbit of the spacecraft through a series of nine bypasses (one on Earth, two at Venus and six at Mercury itself), to gradually slow down BepiColombo so that it can enter orbit around Solar systems innermost planet 2025.
The pre-flight on June 23 was BepiColombo’s second at Mercury, after the probe first encounter with the planet in October 2021. The probe approached Mercury’s surface closest at 05:44 EDT (0944 GMT), as it passed only 200 kilometers from Mercury’s crater-filled surface, closer than the two orbits will operate when the mission begins in earnest.
Related: Mercury looks amazing on this first fly-by photo from Europe and Japan’s BepiColombo mission
The probe took pictures of the burned planet during the bypass with its low-resolution surveillance cameras mounted on the spacecraft’s transmission module.
The two orbiters together carry 16 scientific instruments, but only about 60% of them were in operation during the 48 hours around the next approach, ESA’s BepiColombo project researcher Johannes Benkhoff told Space.com in an email. The rest, including high-resolution cameras, cannot be used in the cruise configuration, as they are hidden either by the spacecraft’s transmission module or its sun visor.
Benkhoff said that the spacecraft’s magnetometers and particle detectors were switched on during the bypass and will probably generate valuable scientific data on the solar wind in the vicinity of Mercury.
During this by-pass, BepiColombo Mercury approached from the night side, Benkhoff noted, which meant that the image could only start 4 minutes after the nearest approach, when the planet was sufficiently illuminated. Then the probe was about 800 km away from Mercury’s surface.
The images, which ESA plans to release within about a day, are expected to reveal craters and tectonic faults on Mercury’s sunburned surface.
“Even during fleeting bypasses, these scientific ‘grips’ are extremely valuable,” Benkhoff said in an ESA statement (opens in new tab). “We get to fly our world-class scientific laboratory through different and unexplored parts of Mercury’s environment that we will not have access to once in orbit, while we get a head start with the preparations to ensure that we will move on to the main thing. the scientific mission as quickly and smoothly as possible. “
BepiColombo is just the second probe in history built to orbit Mercury, after NASA’s messenger mission, which studied the small rocky planet between 2011 and 2015. (Although NASA’s in the 1970s Mariner 10 made three bypasses at Mercury while in orbit around Solar and took the first ever pictures of the planet).
Mercury is a strange world where the temperature reaches up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit (420 degrees Celsius) in the sun-exposed parts, but where scientists also believe water ice lingers in permanently shaded craters around the poles.
Mercury, although geologically dead at first sight, also shows hints of some form of tectonic activityand sports a surprising magnetic field which researchers so far can not fully explain. Many of these mysteries were revealed by Messenger, and researchers hope that BepiColombo will provide the missing answers.
BepiColombo still has four bypasses left before he finally gets into orbit around Mercury. The next bypass will take place in a year from now. Meanwhile, next month, BepiColombo will approach the sun closest from its entire mission.
Reaching Mercury is notoriously difficult, more difficult than reaching the distant giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. The reason for this is that the sun is seriousness constantly accelerates every Mercury-bound probe, which needs to release energy and speed – hence the long and winding journey with planetary bypasses.
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