ESA Announces First Mission to Mysterious Mercury

This will be ESA's first mission to the closest planet to the Sun and will probably involve the most comprehensive study ever conducted on Mercury. BepiColombo will study the formation and evolution of the planet, its inner regions and its problematic magnetic field, the surface and, last but no the least, some interesting aspects predicted by the Theory of Relativity.

Astrium, the firm which is responsible for building the orbiter, was chosen by the ESA back in 2006 as the prime contractor for the project. The contract between the two sides has been signed today in Germany, at Friedrichshafen. The mission itself was selected by the ESA in late 2000. The program is actually a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and is scheduled to launch somewhere around August 2013, while the probe itself will reach Mercury in 2019.

BepiColombo will consist of two main modules, one provided by the ESA and the second by JAXA. According to Johannes Benkhoff, ESA's probe, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter will have the task of making observations on the planet's surface and internal composition in different light spectrums, while JAXA's contribution, the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter will mostly study the planet's elusive magnetic field. The two will be carried in Mercury's orbit by the Mercury Transfer Module and released into different orbits.

Jan van Casteren, the project manager of the mission, argues that the contractor will encounter a few difficulties while protecting the MPO orbiter form the intense heat of the Sun, and the deadly radiation routinely emitted from the star. A second difficulty is related to the problems of slowing down the spacecraft, so that the additional speed would not add to the Sun's powerful gravitational field which could easily send the probe way from the planet.

The European orbiter will also be the first probe sent to Mercury that will make observations by pointing its instruments directly at the planet, which was previously unattempted due to the high temperatures radiated from the surface.

The design stage of the MPO probe will begin in the spring of this year, in order to start the building process somewhere around the next year. The total cost of the mission is evaluated at about 665 million Euro.