A seven-year journey to Mercury, one of the solar system s least studied planets, is about to get underway.
The space probe duo BepiColombo, named after Italian engineer and mathematician Giuseppe Colombo, is considered one of the most demanding space missions the European Space Agency (ESA) has ever undertaken.
This might sound surprising, because at first glance the project appears to be a simple one — at least when compared to missions such as Rosetta s landing on comet Chury in 2014.
After all, it s just an orbiter probe — albeit one with two components — like many others before it that have visited planets in our solar system.
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Mercury: Planet of opposites
But getting a probe to Mercury is not as easy as it sounds. ESA has teamed up with the Japanese space agency JAXA for this technically challenging mission. Extreme climatic conditions around the planet will add an element of difficultly to the study, as Mercury has virtually no atmosphere.
At the same time, it is the planet closest to the sun. As a result, the planet can heat up to around 430 degrees Celsius (806 degrees Fahrenheit) during the extremely long days that prevail there. At night, it drops to temperatures as low as minus 180 degrees Celsius.
Little is known about Mercury. Its conditions make it inhospitable and with a diameter of 4,878 kilometers (3,031 miles), it is only slightly larger than our Earth s moon.
Only two NASA probes — the Mariner in 1975 and Messenger between 2011 and 2015 — have ever visited the planet named for the Roman deity and messenger of the gods. Messenger s main focus was on the planet s northern hemisphere. Now BepiColombo is to fill the gap and provide data for the southern hemisphere.
