BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/BepiColombo_s_first_views_of_Mercury

by adolph • 5 years ago

184 64 5 years ago

esa.int

adolph2• 5 years ago

The closest approach took place at 23:34 UTC on 1 October at an altitude of 199 km from the planet’s surface.

noizejoy• 5 years ago

Albeit the pictures are from at least 1000 km away, since closest approach was from the dark side.

jcims3• 5 years ago

I’m always amazed at the precision of space probe operations.

It’s a bummer we don’t have better space propulsion systems, five years meandering about the inner solar system to get the right speed and angle to enter an orbit around mercury.

Azrael3000• 5 years ago

Scott Manley did a great video on the probe and its approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sj9cjwFhQY

KineticLensman2• 5 years ago

It’s a bummer we don’t have better space propulsion systems

Hey! I used to work for the company that made BepiColombo's engines [0]

[0] https://www.qinetiq.com/en/news/pioneering-qinetiq-solar-ele...

entrep• 5 years ago

Here's a great overview of BepiColombo's journey: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiCo...

_boffin_• 5 years ago

comets crashing onto the surface at speeds of tens of kilometers per hour.

comets came crashing down slower than one goes in a school zone?

ladberg• 5 years ago

For anyone else reading, it's since been updated to "tens of kilometers per second."

bartvk• 5 years ago

This is a great mission for mankind as well. A previous HN discussion talked about the possibility of a Mercury colony because it has water ice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27741738 https://www.universetoday.com/128531/terraform-mercury/

lmilcin7• 5 years ago

Except colonizing Mercury is of relatively little value because of how little surface of it is usable, impossibility of terraforming the planet, how difficult it is to get there or back and that it does not help to reach any other interesting place in our system or outside of it.

bregma3• 5 years ago

We do these things, and the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.

Valgrim2• 5 years ago

It has, however, a tremendous value for building Dyson swarms and other megastructures.

BeefWellington2• 5 years ago

A colony doesn't strictly have to mean "persist humanity indefinitely into the future" -- it can also mean going there, setting up camp and extracting mineral resources, for example.

pietroppeter• 5 years ago

BepiColombo is named after Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo (1920–1984), a scientist, mathematician and engineer at the University of Padua, Italy, who first proposed the interplanetary gravity assist manoeuvre used by the 1974 Mariner 10 mission, a technique now used frequently by planetary probes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo

ddevault• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo

davidw• 5 years ago

I saw that name and I thought "that's a name from the Veneto".

The history of that university is pretty amazing. I can't recommend the tour enough, if people go through Padova. It's a nice change from all the churches, castles and villas that you see elsewhere in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Padua

pengaru2• 5 years ago

This is cool and all, but why am I looking at black and white photos in 2021 sent from something launched in 2018?

Fronzie• 5 years ago

Because it's a scientific instrument and there's surprisingly little science value in capturing the other visible-light wavelengths.

skywal_l• 5 years ago

Indeed but there is a great marketing value though. And these missions rely on being marketed to the public for continued funding.

guntars2• 5 years ago

Yet there's a fantastic PR and public value. The resolution is also only 1024x1024.

SiempreViernes2• 5 years ago

It's a navigation camera, not output from any main instrument so it doesn't come with a filter wheel. The importance factor is having very good linear response to incoming light, not making good phone backgrounds.

stiller• 5 years ago

The images were taken using the monitoring cameras:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/10/BepiColomb...

Images using primary instruments will follow when it reaches orbit in 2025.

m4rtink• 5 years ago

Does the surface of Mercury actually show any perceptible color or is it just basically grayscale like the Moon ?

ojosilva• 5 years ago

It's even greyer than the Moon apparently. Unless this mission finds an active volcano, which I doubt it will, or some other colorful feature hidden from the previous missions, I think that's pretty much it, nothing but shades of grey.

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Mercury

Tepix• 5 years ago

It has some subdued colours such as brown and light blue. Here's a previous NASA image:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110331.html

Here's an image with exaggerated colours:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110616.html

xioxox• 5 years ago

BepiColombo has an X-ray telescope on board which will measure the X-ray colours of the planet from X-ray fluorescence. This will be interesting, as it will enable the composition of the surface to be measured down to 10 km scales [1].

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00750-2

adrian_b• 5 years ago

The most abundant minerals in rocks in the solar system are white oxides, except for the iron(II) and manganese oxides, which are blackish.

So most rocks are gray, unless they have been exposed to oxygen, which converts the black iron oxide into red iron oxide, in which case the rocks turn from some gray shade to some brown shade.

Where there has been water, the water could have been dissociated by light, providing oxygen for the change of color. In the absence of water, there are few chances for anything else that could change the color of the rocks from gray.

TedDoesntTalk• 5 years ago

BepiColombo’s main science mission will begin in early 2026. It is making use of nine planetary flybys in total: one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury, together with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, to help steer into Mercury orbit. Its next Mercury flyby will take place 23 June 2022.

What a strange mission. Why can’t it stay in orbit around Mercury now?

arethuza• 5 years ago

It's going too fast and doesn't carry enough fuel to slow down directly into orbit.

brylie3• 5 years ago

By way of example, here is a video explaining what was needed to get the Messenger spacecraft into orbit around Mercury:

https://youtu.be/gBwspxfW10w

microtonal• 5 years ago

The Wikipedia page has a nice description of the issues of entering Mercury's orbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Research_with...

brylie3• 5 years ago

Here is an example of a rocket design/mission in Kerbal Space Program that can insert into orbit on the first pass:

https://youtu.be/lYwrbhzj694

ericbarrett• 5 years ago

Worth noting the Kerbol* solar system is significantly smaller and lighter than the real one, and has fewer eccentricities in orbit, axis of rotation for the various bodies, and so on. E.g. it takes about 3,300 m/s of 𝛥v to reach orbit around Kerbal, and LKO velocity is ~2200; for Earth, about 9,400, with LEO velocity of ~7300.

If you play KSP and would like a challenge much closer to real rocketry, check out the Realism Overhaul mod—and don't forget Principia. For an actual campaign based on the Apollo program, starting in 1951, check out RP-1 (Realistic Progression).

* Kerbol is the name of the star

gorgoiler• 5 years ago

We live in a village at the top of a very steep, mile deep, ice covered valley. Mercury is a village at the bottom of the valley.

Your house is high up the valley but you actually live thirty feet deep in a pit. To get to Mercury you have to build a car, lift it out the pit, then slide down the steep valley. The car has to be lightweight so that you can lift it out the pit: the engine and brakes are weak and do next to nothing.

So you build a feeble car — more of a four wheeled bicycle really, hoist it out the pit, and slide down the valley in it. By the time you whizz past Mercury you’re doing 100mph so you can’t stop. You go straight past and start sliding up the other side, but you do also put the brakes on for a bit. You’ll eventually slide back down to Mercury again at 90mph and put the brakes on again, and slow down a little more.

Do this ~10x and you’ll eventually stop.

Going in the other direction is easier. Earth is surrounded in a 100km soft squishy cushion of gas which means to all intents and purposes you can just fly straight at it.

harscoat• 5 years ago

To see how bare the planet is, with so many cosmic impacts… makes us wonder how fragile a planet with life is

lmilcin7• 5 years ago

I am no expert, but I think it is very likely most of these craters are from very early life of the planet, before there was life on Earth. Orbit of Mercury is very well cleaned of any other bodies and must have been like this for billions of years.

Because there is no erosion mechanism on Mercury (except for crumbling due to temperature changes) these craters were preserved perfectly.

jrootabega• 5 years ago

This is an amazing achievement.

Also, there appears to be a typo in one of the images near the bottom. "Lemontov" instead of "Lermontov".

cletus• 5 years ago

I see a bunch of confusion about Mercury in this thread so let me correct the record.

First, as to why colonize Mercury, there are some really good reasons:

1. Cheap, abundant energy (ie solar);

2. Access to tons of raw materials, particularly metals;

3. Relatively low gravity means getting into orbit is relatively low cost.

A few people have stated we'd hide in a crater as a negative. We'd live underground probably in submerged habitats that spin to produce Earth-like gravity, just as we would have to on Mars and the Moon.

For Mars in particular, people have this romantic notion of living on the surface. We wouldn't. There's essentially no atmosphere. Worse than no atmosphere actually there's just enough to cover all your gear in dust and do little else for you. You still have to worry about radiation. Terraforming is a monstrously massive project that would take millenia.

The biggest negative to Mercury is how hard it is to reach from Earth. Fun fact: the delta-V required to reach Mercury from Earth is more than that to escape the Solar System (eg like New Horizons). There's a reason this probe is taking 7 years to get there and doing multiple gravity brakes along the way (watch the ESA animation [1]).

If you're going to bootstrap a Dyson Swarm, Mercury is almost the perfect place to do it from.

[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2017/07/Animation_...

Loughla• 5 years ago

Two things from that video:

1. The amount of planning that is required for this is just astounding to me. That we can pretty trivially plan to use something like planetary motion as a motor is fascinating.

2. I'm really bad at Kerbal Space Program.

BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury

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