Destination Mercury!
UK-built spacecraft to search for water on closest planet to the Sun
IT is a small, strange planet whose mysteries have long eluded us.
But last night experts were hoping that a British-built spacecraft would shed some light on Mercury – and confirm if the nearest planet to the Sun has water.
BepiColombo, launched by Europe’s huge Ariane rocket, was set to blast off at 2.30am and will take seven years to travel to Mercury at a speed of 60 km, or 37 miles, per second.
It is set to probe icy patches on the northern pole thought by scientists to be frozen water. The trip is said to be the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever planned by the European Space Agency.
The BepiColombo spacecraft, named after an Italian scientist and mainly built at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, will brave temperatures of up to 450C (842F) on Mercury and is wrapped in a ‘space blanket’ of 97 layers of aluminium, plastic and glass ceramic fabrics.
It will travel 5.6billion miles in total and will seek to better understand Mercury’s volcanic eruptions. On arrival, it will deploy two orbiters – one built at the University of Leicester and another in Japan. These will
Most ambitious exploration
test the chemistry of spots on the planet’s northern pole, which scientists believe, but have not yet confirmed, to be ice. Johannes Benkhoff, for BepiColombo at the European Space Agency, said: ‘Because Mercury is not tilted like Earth, it is spinning almost in the orbital plane. Therefore there are some craters on the poles which never see sunlight and in these craters we find water ice.’
BepiColombo is only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury, which is at least 47million miles from Earth.
A previous mission was carried out by NASA’s Mariner 10, which flew by in 1974 and 1975, and the Messenger spacecraft which earlier this decade detected ice on the part of the planet where temperatures plummet to minus 190C (minus 310F).
The new spacecraft, built by Airbus, was due to blast off from French Guiana early this morning but will not arrive until 2025. The Ariane rocket that launches it falls away after less than half an hour. Then BepiColombo is set to make fly-bys of Earth and Venus on its way so that it can avoid the massive gravitational pull of the sun and slow down enough to orbit the planet. Ion thrusters, made by British defence technology company QinetiQ, will provide the much-needed low thrust. BepiColombo has three sections – a ‘transfer module’ designed to get it to the planet and its two orbiters, the European Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) carrying 11 instruments, and the Japanese Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). Spending up to two years on Mercury, it is hoped to answer questions such as why the planet is mainly made from iron. The Mercury Transfer Module was built at aerospace firm Airbus’s Defence and Space division assembly plant in Stevenage, as were key elements of its Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO). The MTM has four ion plasma engines, supplied by UK defence technology firm QinetiQ,