Getting away from this politics stuff for at least a moment, BepiColombo successfully launched a couple of weeks ago. BepiColombo is a European Space Agency / Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency joint mission to Mercury. From the press release:
BepiColombo comprises two science orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or ‘Mio’). The ESA-built Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) will carry the orbiters to Mercury using a combination of solar electric propulsion and gravity assist flybys, with one flyby of Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury, before entering orbit at Mercury in late 2025.
So in seven years we’ll be seeing a bunch of mysteries solved, and bigger bunch of new mysteries generated, because that’s how this sort of thing works. Wheeee!
BepiColombo approaching Mercury.
Credit: spacecraft: ESA/ATG medialab; Mercury: NASA/JPL
(Presumably an artist’s work, but no name is given. Perhaps stitching photos and stuff together doesn’t count as artistry.)
