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The BepiColombo spacecraft has finally reached Mercury after 3 years of traveling. The first photos are amazing but the mission is out for more.
Some incredible new photographs of Mercury have flooded the press from the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission. The spacecraft was launched in 2018 and is on a seven-year space journey to explore the planet closest to the Sun. NASA’s Mariner 10 mission visited Mercury in 1974 and 1975 and later the Messenger spacecraft returned to the planet in 2014 as part of NASA’s solar exploration program.
Mercury is one of the least explored planets in our solar system. For decades Mercury was considered nothing more than a rocky planet, smaller than our Moon, void of life and interest. However, the European and Japanese new mission says there is a lot more to Mercury than what meets the eye.
On 1 October, after 3 full years of space-traveling, the spacecraft BepiColombo got its first glimpse at Mercury. The craft flew past the planet for a gravity assist maneuver and took photos when it was 2,418 kilometers from Mercury. Hours later it swung by for its closest approach speeding just 199 kilometers from its surface. The first images taken by the mission focused on Mercury’s northern hemisphere, areas flooded by lava, smoother and brighter plains, and famous craters like the Calvino crater and the 166 kilometer-wide Lermontov crater, adding to humanity’s collection of stunning space photos.
The Elusive Mercury And Its Mysteries
One of the reasons why Mercury has not been fully explored is because of its speed and the complex maneuvers required for a spacecraft to enter its orbit. Being the planet closest to the Sun, it moves at 105,947 miles per hour. Mercury goes so fast it completes a full orbit around the Sun, which Earth completes in 365 days, in just 88 days. The BepiColombo mission has 9 flyby gravitational maneuvers planned, four of which have already taken place. The craft is designed for accelerating flybys on Earth, and through Venus weather, and six times it will swing through Mercury to finally get it right and steer into its orbit in 2025. But, Europe and Japan have not planned this tricky trip just to take amazing pictures.
ESA says they will unravel the mysteries of Mercury. The mission wants to prove or disprove a theory that states that Mercury was initially formed near Mars and was pushed closest to the Sun by a massive armageddon collision which threw off most of its crust and in its journey affected our own planet and our Moon. This theory would explain the high presence of potassium which evaporates over time in planets closest to the Sun, why NASA saw water in its poles, and why Mercury is the only rocky planet in our solar system, besides Earth, which has a magnetic field. As BepiColombo keeps on its trajectory, moving ahead in its mission to solve the solar system mysteries, speeding near Mercury where the Sun is tripled in size, we should expect it to give us more than just amazing photos.
Source: European Space Agency.
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