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Japan And EU Plan Joint Mission To Mercury
Devar writes "Japan and the European Space Agency have revealed their plans for a joint mission to Mercury that would be the first to land a probe on its surface. The mission also includes two orbiters to map the surface, all due to be launced in 2010."
Did you see the smoke NASA ? :-)
Pretty cool, but not nearly as great as rescuing a haywire AI while orbiting Jupiter
redune.com: The World 3.2 Megapixels at a time
Avg. Surface temp. (of mercury): Day 623 K Source
That's hot enough to keep it lit. And get you fried, in this case, in more ways than one.
Firstly, of course the moon rotates as well. It just rotates at the same angular velocity at which it orbits Earth, so we always see the same face. This is caused by a process called tidal lock.
Mercury is in tidal lock with the sun. But because its trajectory is elliptical, it's not a 1:1 lock, but a 3:2 lock: there are 3 Mercury days in 2 Mercury years.
A Mercury day is 58.6 Earth days, a Mercury year is 88 Earth days, according to this fact sheet. 58.6 days should be enough for most missions.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
There have been many missions to Venus and Mars, a few flybys of Jupiter (and Galileo orbiting Jupiter). Saturn and beyond have only flybys so far, but it takes a long time to get to them. Mercury is relatively close, is close to the sun so solar power can be used (avoiding silly controversy over nuclear power sources) and has only had one spacecraft look at it, from mainly one angle. Also, it's not the moon, but a "new" world to explore. All in all, it's a nice place to send a few robots to prove one's technology and show off, and get useful new results in a reasonable amount of time.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Why did they choose Mercury? Don't get me wrong, I think it's pretty cool, but why not some of the other planets in our system? Scientists are fascinated with Mars because of the possibility of life. There's fascination about Saturn and it having a bazillion moons. Jupiter with it's nutty red spot (man that's a hell of a storm).
Well, at the moment, ESA has a mission going to Mars (Mars Express), Venus shortly (Venus Express), Saturn is covered by Huygens (in combination with Cassini).
Nothing is going to Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto at the moment, but most of those are real buggers to get to easily.
Mercury is the only planet in the inner solar system which ESA hasn't sent anything to yet (or is about to). Add to that the fact that so little is known about it, Mariner 10 left many questions unanswered, and it's about time we had a look.
Actually it is rocket science...