Ariane rocket to hoist Europe-Japan Mercury mission
An Ariane-5 rocket blasts off on August 6 from the European space centre at Kourou, French Guiana. An unmanned European-Japanese mission to Mercury will be launched by Ariane 5 rocket in July 2014 under a contract announced by Arianespace.
An unmanned European-Japanese mission to Mercury will be launched by Ariane 5 rocket in July 2014 under a contract announced on Thursday by Arianespace.
The BepiColombo mission, named after a 20th-century Italian mathematician who studied the rotation of Mercury, comprises two probes that will enter orbit around the closest planet to the Sun after a six-year trek.
The rocket for the 4.4-tonne payload will be a heavy-lift Ariane 5 ECA, hoisted from the European Space Agency (ESA) base in Kourou, French Guiana, the European launch operator said in a press release.
The partners in the mission are ESA, providing the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), whose contribution is the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter.
Mercury is listed in ESA's "cornerstone" investigations of the Solar System, which include the ongoing missions to Mars and Venus, as well as the Huygens probe, which was sent down to the Saturnian moon of Titan in January 2005 by the US spacecraft Cassini.
BepiColombo will use slow-but-steady solar propulsion and gravitational boosts from swings around Earth, Venus and Mercury itself to arrive at its destination in 2020.
The two orbiters will carry instruments to explore Mercury's crater-pocked surface, its magnetic field and thin vestigial atmosphere. Because of budgetary constraints, plans to add a small lander, the Mercury Surface Element (MSE), have been scrapped.
Mercury is one of the most enigmatic planets of the Solar System.
Temperatures reach 425 degrees Celsius (800 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day but plummet to -100 C (-150 F) at night.
Even though the planet is relatively close to Earth, it has been little explored, mainly because of the challenge of shielding scoutcraft from the radiation blasted out by the nearby Sun.
A NASA probe, MESSENGER, went into orbit around Mercury on March 17 for a year-long investigation after a six-and-a-half-year trip.
(c) 2011 AFP
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Rank: 1 / 5 (2)
hilarious, so now its just another pointless orbiter mission.
What's the point anyway?
We've sent basic probes in the past, and they're useless.
Wow. It's a hot rock, and will never be safe to mine or anything else like that.
It's not like you're going to discover some new revolution in physics by sending multiple extra probes to Mercury.
You wont solve the theory of everything there, and you won't find the higgs, and you won't find a way to sythesize anti-matter, and you won't find time travel or warp propulsion, or anything useful in finding any of those things either.
So what's the big deal?
It's wasting all this time and money on a science mission that is extremely, EXTREMELY unlikely to provide any new discovery of any significant economic value, if anything whatsoever, besides some statistic in a wikipedia article....
Sep 15, 2011
Rank: 1 / 5 (2)
...add another paragraph or two to the wikipedia article on "Mercury", but not provide one damn thing that benefits any of the citizens who paid for this program with tax payers money. Not only that, but the tax payers paid for these programs, but the companies and organizations who got the contracts to build all this stuff owns all the patents on the technologies, and the "investors" who were the tax payers, got none of the "rights" to it.
Everybody is a fricken serf for the contractors for government space programs.
Nobody has ever invented something based on a discovery made in space through space exploration. not even one thing.
GPS and satellites don't count, since GPS is based on relativity, which was known before the space age even began, and has little to do with planetary exploration, and regular satellites were always part of the plan of the early space age anyway, before exploration even began...
so what's the point?