The goal of the BepiColombo mission is the planet Mercury, which has so far been somewhat neglected alongside our gas giants and especially Mars. The mission started three years ago, specifically on October 20, 2018, but it is not yet ready to settle at its destination. It is not so easy to reach Mercury and reach its orbit, and in addition to the strongly eccentric orbit of this planet, it is also due to the nearby Sun with its strong attraction.
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In fact, it was only BepiColombo’s first close flyby of Mercury out of a total of six, and only then would the dual probe be ready to settle at Mercury. Now he has flown around the Earth, two maneuvers at Venus and the first at Mercury.
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And as the attached video shows, it will now circle between the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and with gravitational maneuvers and ion motors will gradually shrink its apoapsid (the farthest point in orbit) until it reaches almost the same orbit as Mercury, and then it will just wait for the space rendezvous, which will allow the spacecraft to safely place itself in the planet’s polar orbit, even with low-power engines. And this will happen according to plan until December 5, 2025, ie only then will the main part of the mission begin.
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Both probes, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO from ESA) and the Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO from JAXA), which now travel as the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), will use a range of scientific instruments to study Mercury, including accelerometer, laser altimeter, plasma sensors, they will monitor dust, various spectra from gamma radiation to infrared radiation, while having to deal with high temperatures, which will prevent them from fully exposing their solar panels to the sun, for example, as these could easily reach more than 350 ° C.
The aim of the whole mission is to clarify the past of the planet Mercury and its development with regard to the magnetic field or a remarkably large core. It is possible that Mercury, like Earth, has experienced a major collision with another young planet in the past, causing it to lose much of its mantle and crust. It ended up with a core that makes up 55% of the planet’s volume, while the Earth’s core occupies only 17%. According to competitive theory, however, all this can simply be due to the Sun, which carried away lighter material during the formation of the planet. And from the polar orbit, the probes will also be able to look into craters in which it is eternally dark, whether there is any water or water ice in them by chance.
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