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BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury
- harscoat 5y agoTo see how bare the planet is, with so many cosmic impacts… makes us wonder how fragile a planet with life is
- lmilcin 5y agoI 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.
- _boffin_ 5y 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 5y agoFor anyone else reading, it's since been updated to "tens of kilometers per second."
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- adolph 5y agoThe closest approach took place at 23:34 UTC on 1 October at an altitude of 199 km from the planet’s surface.
- noizejoy 5y agoAlbeit the pictures are from at least 1000 km away, since closest approach was from the dark side.
- jcims 5y agoI’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 5y agoScott Manley did a great video on the probe and its approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sj9cjwFhQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sj9cjwFhQY
- KineticLensman 5y agoIt’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-electric-propulsion-system-seps-to-power-esas-bepicolombo-mission-to-mercury https://www.qinetiq.com/en/news/pioneering-qinetiq-solar-ele...
- jcims 5y agoAh now i get the username! :D Very cool!
- KineticLensman 5y agoThank you. It actually started for photography reasons when I knew a (friendly) rival photographer who worked for one of our customer organizations. [Edit] That and my liking for the Space Opera novels written by E.E. 'Doc' Smith.
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- entrep 5y agoHere's a great overview of BepiColombo's journey: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/Why_does_it_take_so_long_to_get_to_Mercury https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiCo...
- bartvk 5y agoThis 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27741738 https://www.universetoday.com/128531/terraform-mercury/ https://www.universetoday.com/128531/terraform-mercury/
- lmilcin 5y agoExcept 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.
- bregma 5y agoWe do these things, and the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.
- lmilcin 5y agoNo, there are very few people who actually do this. People collectively do hard things when they are profitable. Profitability here in most broad sense possible. US did not send men to Moon because it was hard. It was done because US was in a race with USSR and winning that race was profitable to US. Having public opinion excited about some goal can be profitable, too. If you don't believe, think about it: why has Apollo program been stopped? Because people got used to it and there was nothing further to prove -- further sanding people to Moon after US has demonstrated it can do it repeatedly was extremely expensive but there were no longer any significant profits from it. So while it was still hard it actually became unprofitable to continue to do so. If it was hard that caused US to send people to Moon, they would not stop sending people, they would be sending more, build base on Moon, etc.
- Valgrim 5y agoIt has, however, a tremendous value for building Dyson swarms and other megastructures.
- pietroppeter 5y 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo
- ddevault 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BepiColombo
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- davidw 5y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Padua
- pengaru 5y agoThis is cool and all, but why am I looking at black and white photos in 2021 sent from something launched in 2018?
- Fronzie 5y agoBecause it's a scientific instrument and there's surprisingly little science value in capturing the other visible-light wavelengths.
- skywal_l 5y agoIndeed but there is a great marketing value though. And these missions rely on being marketed to the public for continued funding.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoESA funding isn't really politicised that way since it's a international organisation and no single politician can get their names on things.
- adolph 5y agoAll Member States contribute to these programmes on a scale based on their Gross National Product (GNP). The other programmes, known as ‘optional’, are only of interest to some Member States, who are free to decide on their level of involvement. https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Funding https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Funding
- dotancohen 5y agoGood thing that Giuseppe Colombo wasn't a politician!
- bregma 5y agoThey could probably get more funding if they reduced the amount of science the probes do so they could insert sell and insert advertizing into the data stream.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y 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?
- brylie 5y agoHere 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 https://youtu.be/lYwrbhzj694
- ericbarrett 5y agoWorth 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
- brylie 5y agoI'm having enough difficulty reaching low Kerbin orbit. If anything, I'd like a mod that lets my son and I learn the basics of building and launching rockets with more of an auto-pilot flight mode. We are kern to explore more of the Kerbol system but are having great difficulty with basic missions.
- arethuza 5y agoIt's going too fast and doesn't carry enough fuel to slow down directly into orbit.
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- jrootabega 5y agoThis is an amazing achievement. Also, there appears to be a typo in one of the images near the bottom. "Lemontov" instead of "Lermontov".
- cletus 5y agoI 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_visualising_BepiColombo_s_journey_to_Mercury https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2017/07/Animation_...
- Loughla 5y agoTwo 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.