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Now, Mercury is the planet that's usually closest to Earth, because that surprised you,
did me.
Venus certainly gets closer to us than Mercury.
It can be as close as 25 million miles.
After all, Venus is the second planet from the Sun, and Earth is the third.
Even Mars gets closer to Earth than Mercury.
The red planet can come as close to our home as 35 million miles, as it will in the year
2287.
I won't be around for that.
The average distance from Earth to Mercury is 48 million miles, but Mercury is still
usually the closest planet to Earth.
That's because Venus is usually somewhere on the other side of the Sun for 112 days,
and Mars is usually far away in its highly elliptical, almost two-year-long orbit.
That leaves Mercury zipping between the Earth and the Sun every 44 days, and does
us usually closer to Earth than either Venus or Mars.
A good trivia question to pull on your friends, isn't it?
22 spacecraft have successfully flown to Venus, and over 30 spacecraft have flown to Mars,
but only two have ever gone to Mercury.
So what's so hard about going there?
Well, it has to do with the Sun.
Mercury is not only the planet that is usually closest to Earth, it is also the planet that
is always closest to the Sun, 28.6 million miles close to be precise.
Being that close to the Sun creates navigational challenges to put it mildly.
Any spacecraft going to Mercury gets accelerated by the tremendous gravitational pull of the
Sun.
The spacecraft will be moving too fast to go into orbit around Mercury.
That's why the first spacecraft that went to Mercury, the USA's Mariner 10 merely flew
by Mercury three times, but made no attempt to achieve orbit around Mercury.
The only other ship to go to Mercury, the USA's messenger spacecraft, took six and a half
years to get there.
Now that's a trip.
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For finally running out of fuel and crashing onto the surface of Mercury on April 20, 2015.
The other spacecraft have flown to Jupiter in about the same time or less than it took
messenger to go to Mercury.
The hang-up is the deceleration of the spacecraft.
Quite simply, it takes too much on-board fuel supply to fire the engines in the reverse direction
and break the speed of the ship against the sun's great gravity.
Slowing down sufficiently to get into orbit around Mercury is a no-go using rocket power.
Some other way had to be found to slow messenger down, a way that didn't use much or any fuel.
Messenger was a hefty 2,400 pounds or so, loaded with 9 pieces of state-of-the-art scientific
equipment.
Now, 55 percent of the total weight, or about 1,300 pounds, was fuel.
But this fuel would not be used to slow the spacecraft down.
The fuel would be used for five engine burns associated with gravity assists and also
for orbital adjustments once messenger got to Mercury.
Now, gravity assists uses the gravity of a planet and the planet's orbital velocity
to either speed up or slow down a spacecraft.
If the ship approaches a planet at a forward-moving angle, that is, an angle in the direction
the planet is revolving around the sun, then both the planet's gravity and the orbital
velocity of the planet give the spacecraft a sling shot boost, greatly increasing the
speed of the craft and sending it off in a different direction.
This boost in speed can be added to by the spacecraft firing its rocket engines at just
the right time.
Both of America's Voyager probes use Jupiter's massive gravity to sling shot them to the
outer-gas giant planets and eventually out of the solar system.
Gravity assists can also be used to slow down a spacecraft, as in the case of messenger.
By entering a planet's orbital path ahead of the planet, the planet's gravity pulls back
on the spacecraft and slows it down.
An engine burn is necessary at this time to escape the orbital path of the planet.
Messenger performed one gravity assist flyby of Earth, two gravity assist flybys of Venus,
and three gravity flybys of Mercury.
He then had messenger been slowed enough to enter into orbit around Mercury.
The probe traveled an astounding five billion miles to get to Mercury from Earth, that's
farther than Pluto is away from Earth at its most distant.
The name messenger is an acronym, almost as clever as its intricate flight path to Mercury.
Because Mercury is the fastest moving planet, the ancient Greeks appointed Mercury as
the messenger of Olympus.
Venus traveled fast even back then.
Messenger really stands for Mercury Surface Space Environment Geochemistry and Ranging.
Hmm, what do you think?
Do they have a contest to come up with that?
Now, the good news is, there's another mission to Mercury underway right now.
It is a combined ESSA-JAXA space mission that is bringing two orbiting satellites to Mercury.
The mission doesn't use an acronym for its spacecraft, it has a real name.
Beppy Colombo.
No, it's not a cartoon character.
Dr. Giuseppe Colombo, after whom the spacecraft is named, was an Italian mathematician and
professor of applied mechanics.
He worked with NASA on the Mariner 10 mission to Mercury.
Beppy is Giuseppe's childhood nickname, which everyone knew and loved him.
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NASA had been content with one flyby of Mercury, the first ever.
Professor Beppi calculated that with a slight adjustment of the flight path to enable a gravity
assist at Venus, Mariner-10 could fly by Mercury again and again on different orbits around
the Sun.
Thanks to Beppi, NASA got three flybys of Mercury for the price of one.
Beppi Columbo, though spacecraft, is scheduled to perform nine gravity assist flybys, one
at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury itself.
Such planetary deceleration slows Beppi Columbo relative to the speed Mercury is moving around
the Sun.
This will allow for orbital insertion, otherwise Beppi Columbo would head off into the Sun.
Now, once an orbit around Mercury, Beppi Columbo's Mercury Transfer Module or MTM for
short will release two satellites, one European, the MPO, Mercury Planetary Orbiter, and
one Japanese, the MiO, Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter.
Both are expected to orbit Mercury for one year.
Altogether, the MCS, Mercury Composite spacecraft, consists of the MPO, the MiO, the MTM,
and MOSF, which protects the spacecraft from the Sun and houses the electronics for MiO.
This alphabet soup of mission components highlights the other reason it is difficult
to get to Mercury.
Under six gravity assist slowdowns, six engine burns, 18 orbits around the Sun, six and
a half years of travel time, and nine billion miles of distance.
You have to bring a tailored complex of equipment.
It's like that mountain picnic you'd like to go on.
You can't just drive there.
You have to hike a long way up a tricky mountain trail and bring along insect repelling, sunscreen,
and your head.
Oh, and lunch and beverages, it's not easy.
Tipo Colombo has packed it all, including lunch.
Nah, not really.
The design is incredibly complex.
Nothing can face the Sun, not even the solar panels.
The solar panels must be kept turned almost to a right angle to the Sun, or the heat and
particle flux will corrode the solar cells, and without electricity, you have nothing.
Therefore, at right angles to the Sun, the solar panels must be extra long, as if there
were only a little bit of sunshine.
Beppie's solar panels are 50 feet long.
The Sun shield must remain gyroscopically aligned towards the Sun, so that all instruments
are always in the shade, but still have a line of sight to what each is meant to monitor.
And there are a lot of instruments.
Five in the Jackson Orbiter, and eleven in the Esa Orbiter.
It's one amazing picnic.
Anyway, the science objectives are meant to add to what we have learned from the previous
two missions to Mercury.
The data collected by Beppie Colombo will enable scientists to study the planet's interior
and composition, along with Mercury's geology and surface morphology.
Mercury's magnetic fields formation and evolutionary history, the planet's solar wind interactions
and overall environment.
As a middle-rich planet, Mercury may hold a vast wealth of minerals that messenger
fail to detect.
Beppie Colombo launched in October 2018 and still has a long way to go before he goes
into orbit around Mercury.
However, Beppie has already flown past Mercury and returned new photographs.
The European Space Agency is excited about its first hot mission.
All of the Esa's previous missions have been cold missions to objects further out into
space, such as Mars, the asteroid belt, comet rendezvous, and elsewhere far out in
the solar system.
Well, all I can say is, best wishes to Beppie Colombo.
Let's hope all goes well on its 800 degrees Fahrenheit mission to Mercury.
Let's hope that Mercury's long tail of exosphere gases, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, blown
off the planet's surface by the solar wind, don't fog up the lenses or coat the solar panels.
Have a nice time, ciao, baby!
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