Japan Aims for First Landing on Mercury

Not till 2014 or so, but still a worth effort.

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Excellent. And that's a real snip at that budget, so I hope Mars Express works out (I'm betting there will be much commonality with Mars/Venus Express and Rosetta, so the design needs to be proven).

Incidentally the mission concept (BepiColombo) was firmly approved by ESA a while ago, but there was a lot of doubt hanging over whether it would include a lander. I guess the firm committment from Japan has settled that.

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the BepiColombo mission - perhaps planned for 2012, which will explore Mercury

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/obj...objectid=31272

BepiColombo's trip would be a 3.5 year tour of the inner Solar System ending up in orbit around Mercury about 2015.

Two spacecraft. The BepiColombo project will include two spacecraft to map the planet and examine the planet's magnetosphere – Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).

two orbiters alone could be launched on a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The two orbiters and the lander would be launched on one of ESA's Ariane 5 rockets from Kourou, French Guiana. Either way, the spacecraft would take 3.5 years to travel to Mercury.

ESA mission in cooperation with Japan.

Launch methods are presently under study




I think NASAs Messenger is going to beat them to it and arrive first to study Mercury

This is awesome news! =D> =D> =D> =D>

One interesting point, the article talks about several Soyuz launchers, so are the probes going to travel separately, or will there be an an orbital rendezvous? Perhaps the ordbiters will require one launch, the lander a second.

As I recall Bepe-Columbo will be using hall thrusters to shorten transit - 3.5 years instead of 8, as is the case with Messenger.

One error in the article. Japan's first interplanetary missions were Susei and Sakigake to Halley's comet, launched in 1985. Both were successful.

Jon

Just out of curiosity, what are the advantages to landing on Mercury? What type of scientific data could we get from Mercury that makes it more worthwhile than Mars or Venus (or some of the Jovian moons)? I would think that studying those 2 planets would have more benefits than studying Mercury, since money plays such a large role in space exploration. Don't get me wrong, a mission to Mercury is certainly interesting, but is it being driven because they want to be the first to land on it?

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This article talks about what the two launcher will do, but it also mentions the now-cancelled lander, so I don't know if it's accurate any more.

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=D> Thank you for this, MoMo. You've saved my fingers from the pain of typing exactly the same. Nice that you also mentioned the Jovian moons, maybe one could add Titan as well. And last but not least on my list: the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

:-k Isn't it kind of curious that we'll make touchdowns on Mercury, asteroids, comets but haven't even projected landing on the surface of Europa to analyze some ice samples?

Though flying with the Japanese Space Agency should be fun again. Remember Nozomi ("Hope"), that little strayer which missed Mars and flew for years on a Odyssey of fly-bys through the inner solar system to get on Mars course again, just to finally miss Mars another time? That probe actually reminded me of someone, who was it? Ah yes, Tama-chan, the young arctic seal that somehow went astray in 2002 and ended up living in the Yokohama river where he became a big celebrity:

http://due-travel.hp.infoseek.co.jp/...geazarashi.htm

http://www.superlupo-magazin.de/viewtopic.php?t=803

So here's a name proposal for the Japanese Space Agency's Mercury probe: Tama-chan

No matter how many probes are sent to different places there will always be those who grizzle because some pet project. What about the Centaurs? What about Venus-crossing asteroids, or the Oort cloud?

To date Mercury has experienced three flybys by one spacecraft in the past 30 or so years. In a similar time frame we have had 5 flybys of Jupiter (another two coming up) an orbiter, and a Jupiter descent probe. Saturn has had three flybys and orbiter, plus a descent probe/lander for Titan. I think Mercury is well over due for more attention - there isn't even complete coverage of the surface.

Jon

Nobody complained about the current Messenger mission. It will complete what Mariner 10 began.

But a lander on the dark side of Mercury during the planet's night? Should that really become a priority among plans for planetary landers? I think there are some places in the solar system which promise a much better yield for in situ exploration.

Obviously the mission and funding agencies think differently. Why is Messenger OK but not the more ambitious Bepi Columbo?

Why land? Ground truth the orbiter instruments is one good reason.
Information on the compostion of the Hermean regolith will yield information on planetary differentiation, volatile history, magmatic processes, interaction with the solar wind, bulk composition of the innermost solar system. Searching for seismic activity will provide clues on the interior of Mercury that will complement orbiter observations of the magnetic and gravitational fields. The penetratometer can provide a shallow sub surface profile. A micro rover can analyse a range of rocks. If the lander is targeted on the poles it may be able to study ices.

We have to be careful that we don't fall into the trap of saying that a particular mission isn't want I am particularly interested in and therefore it isn't important. I am not particularly interested in (say) the Sun, except in a general way. But I would not dream of saying that missions like Genesis or SOHO or Solar Orbiter are therefore unimportant.

I would also point out another error in the article. The lander will be built by ESA, not JAXA, so the title is misleading. JAXA will build one of the orbiters.

Jon

I will point out that this is all a moot point because BepiColombo no longer includes a lander, just two orbiters.

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Huh?!?
As far as I know, we haven't sent any descent probes to Jupiter. Gallileo was sent into the Jovian atmosphere, as a means of disposing of an orbiter that was running out of fuel and for which there was no safe long term orbit. That was hardly in the mission profile! That's like calling Genesis a "hard impact probe"! :roll:

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Galileo included a descent probe. It entered the atmosphere in 1995.

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Six. Two Pioneers, two Voyagers, Ulysses and Cassini.

Two? New Horizons is one, what is the other one?

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now we see more cutbacks ?

Excerpt from a News article by Jenny Hogan

"The [funding] situation has led to speculation that BepiColombo, a mission destined for a 2013 launch to Mercury, might be cancelled. 'That is the big danger painted in the sky,' says Karl-Heinz Glassmeier, principal investigator on one of the instruments proposed for the spacecraft.
"Nerves were set jangling about the project, which also involves the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, after it was postponed because the initial design was too heavy. That problem seems to have been solved, but officials say the estimated cost of the mission, at 600 million [euros] to 650 million [euros], is still more than 100 million [euros] above target."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...068/index.html
Europe's cash crisis puts space plans under threat

Japanese / European mission will be axed ?

Juno, due to launch about 2010, to perform magnetosphere and inner structure of jovian atmosphere studies.

Mauro

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But that's not a flyby, that's a dedicated mission to the Jovian system, ala Galileo.

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Aviation Week & Space Technology (World News & Analysis):
ESA Poised to Approve Planet-Finding, Mercury Missions
Aviation Week & Space Technology
"Olthof says the agency has heeded lessons from previous large missions, which suffered big overruns due to unrealistic funding. The budget envelope will be 550 million euros ($673 million) for Gaia and 650 million euros for BepiColombo--versus 450 million euros previously allocated to large missions."

a PDF file
http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU06...06-J-02798.pdf
updated status report, which is to be presented at the EGU General Assembly


The European Space Agency (ESA) is launching a mission to Mercury, in which there is significant Finnish involvement. On Thursday 9 February 2006, the Science Programme Committee of the ESA held a meeting to approve the agency's next cornerstone programme, the spacecraft named BepiColombo, which is due to be launched towards Mercury in 2013.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Th...o_Mercury.html
The ESA is building a planetary probe which will end up on a low elliptical orbit around Mercury for at least one year. The orbiter will carry with it cameras which can take accurate images of different wavelengths of the surface of this exotic and little-known planet, and also equipment for measuring local particle radiation and the intensity of the Sun. The Finns will be strongly involved especially in these measurements with their instrument built in Finland.

I suppose I was being too literal in my previous post:
But if you count Galileo and Juno, than Jupiter by now had almost fourty flybys -- six I listed and one for each Galileo's approach.

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That is the news i am waiting for ,at last a mission to Mercury. I hope a manned or a (un)manned with a lander with rovers to (like on mars) discover and photograph the surface on Mercury. Because of the intense sunheat and radiation is it nessecary (i think) but maybe i am wrong ,to land at the poles of Mercury,or a little time after sunrise or before sunset because the heat on the surface is not so extreme then. What do you think?

ESA gives go-ahead to build BepiColombo
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMC8XBE8YE_index_0.html
26 February 2007
BepiColombo, ESA's mission to explore planet Mercury, has been definitively 'adopted' by the Agency’s Science Programme Committee (SPC) last Friday. The mission will now start its industrial implementation phase, to prepare for launch in August 2013.

Landing on the dark side's a nice idea, 'cept the dark side doesn't stay dark for very long. 57 days for a rotation, so you've got maybe 28 days of darkness, tops, if you land on the trailing edge of the terminator. More likely, they'll be lucky to get two weeks of nightsky before sunrise. I'd sooner tap the RSA folks for a few pointers on how they worked up their Venera models and give this thing a fighting chance to work in the daylight hours.

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FYI, yeah, I know, its cancelled. But while we're on the subject, lets curb the enthusiasm and put more than two brain cells on the realities of putting hardware on the surface.

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If you are thinking about Mercury Landers, I think the best approach might be to send a Cassini sized craft with one or more autonomous probes with Stardust like arrays of Aerogel. Put the Cassini-sized probe (mothership) into orbit using the same techniqes used to get Messenger there, and then free the probes.

The probes should change orbit to go within a few meters of the surface, and be able to fire a projectile at the surface and collect debris from the impact. The probe would then rendevous with the mothership, which would have to be equipped with the tools to examine the particles collected (microscope, grinding tools, mass spec, oven, gas chromatograph, etc.).

The mothership itself should have a nice HiRes like camera as well.

Bringing the fuel for an actual landing of meaningful equipment would be expensive.

Well, it's an idea.

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Not a bad one, but complicated. Mercury's gravity is much higher than Hayabusa's, so the question becomes just how close do you want to get before you might as well try a landing, or at least a bounce?

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Europe's Mercury mission swings into action

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ESA's BepiColombo mission's costs balloon
By Rob Coppinger

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles...s-balloon.html