by Gavin Hanson
The next mission to Mercury is planned to launch at 9:45 p.m. ET on Friday night from Kourou, French Guiana.
BepiColombo will take seven years to reach Mercury after leaving Earth and will make several planetary fly-bys including Earth, Venus and Mercury itself, before it slows enough to maintain an orbit of the solar system’s smallest planet. It includes two probes — one that will orbit the planet closely, while the other “will orbit farther away, measuring Mercury’s magnetic field,” according to NPR.
Space.com will be providing live coverage of the launch Friday with a commentary starting at 9:15 p.m ET.
The Japanese and European joint mission to Mercury is named BepiColombo after the Italian scientist Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo, who originally calculated the optimal path for an unmanned flight to reach orbit around Mercury, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The first probe sent to Mercury, the Mariner 10, launched in 1973, utilized Colombo’s calculations to orbit the small planet.
The space journey will be “especially challenging because Mercury’s orbit is so close” to the sun, according to the ESA.
It’s estimated the mission will cost European and Japanese space agencies about $1.9 billion, and “national space agencies in Europe have paid for the instrumentation on the MMO, taking the overall budget” to about $3.5 billion, BBC reported.
This will be Europe’s very first mission to Mercury, a trip that of about 5 billion miles, according to CNBC.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org
A coalition of red states is suing the Biden administration to stop its attempt to…
A coalition of major airlines has formed a group supporting a tax credit pushed by…
President Joe Biden has vowed to raise income taxes across the board by making sure…
Michael Cohen hasn’t even taken the stand in former President Donald Trump’s trial, and his…
Howard Johnson’s used to boast over thirty flavors of ice cream. It was great to…
Bidenomics, with its high inflation and high cost of living, is wreaking havoc on the…