Mercury isn’t a very well understood planet, and up until relatively recently, it was considered a boring, dead world not worth focusing on. All this changed with NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft and its amazing mission to Mercury discovered evidence of water ice on the incredibly hot planet.
BepiColombo is a joint ESA and JAXA mission to study Mercury, following up on many of the discoveries made by NASA’s MESSENGER. The mission consists of two orbiters – the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mio (Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, MMO) designed to work together to study the planet’s surface and magnetosphere, among other aspects.
The mission will take 7 years to reach Mercury (thanks to the nature of orbital mechanics), and is planned for a 1 year study period, which means it will finally get to do its job around 2025. Quite a wait, but it will be interesting to see what comes of the mission!
Launching this mission was the mighty Ariane 5, launching from the Guiana Space Center at the scheduled time on October 19th, 2018 at 8:45 P.M. central time. 30 minutes later the space probe was at escape velocity and separated from the upper stage of the Ariane 5.
The launch itself? That was just awesome. Even more awesome to think this is the first Ariane 5 launch to send a spacecraft to another planet. There’s a ton of stuff to talk about with this mission (like any other) but if you follow the links provided above and below they will share all that needs to be said.
For now, though, the launch. I’ll provide 2 links, one from a 3rd party source and another being the official launch live stream which is actually still broadcasting as I write this. Ignition and launch happen at about 2 minutes in to the 1st video – 40 minutes into the second.
Enjoy! More to come as always!