A spacecraft bound for the planet Mercury will take a first look at the target tonight, when it makes its first-ever flyby of the small rocky world during an incredibly close encounter tonight.
BepiColombo’s flyby tonight (Oct. 1) will bring the spacecraft within just 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the surface of Mercury, the closest the probe will ever get to the planet during its mission. The first images from the encounter are expected to reach Earth early Saturday (Oct. 2) and will be the first close images of Mercury’s scorched surface since the end of NASA’s Messenger orbiter mission in 2015.
Artist impression of BepiColombo flying by Mercury on Oct. 1, 2021. (Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab)
BepiColombo will make its closest approach to Mercury at 7:34 p.m. EDT (2334 GMT) today (Oct.1), ESA said in a statement. The spacecraft will then continue on its winding trajectory around the sun.
This close pass is one of nine gravity-assist flybys, maneuvers that use the gravity of celestial bodies to adjust a spacecraft’s trajectory, that BepiColombo needs to perform before it can enter its target orbit around the planet. This flyby, however, will take the spacecraft even closer to the scorched planet’s surface, than its ultimate scientific orbit of 300 to 930 miles (480 to 1,500 kilometers).
Unfortunately, BepiColombo won’t be able to use all of its instruments during this opportunity as it is still in its transit configuration. The spacecraft consists of two orbiters, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, that will eventually circle the planet separately. The two orbiters are stacked on top of a transfer module, which blocks some of their instruments, including a high-resolution camera.
Mercury selfie time!
The €650 million ($750 million) BepiColombo mission will be able to make measurements of the environment around the planet and take images with its black and white ‘selfie’ cameras, which provide a 1024 by 1024 pixel resolution (comparable to an early-2000s flip phone.)
Originally designed to monitor the unfolding of the spacecraft’s solar panels after its launch in October 2018, these selfie cameras previously obtained images of Earth and Venus during earlier BepiColombo flybys. During the Earth flyby in April 2020 and the first Venus flyby in October of that year, BepiColombo zipped by the planets at much greater distances of 7,900 miles (12,700 kilometers) and 6,650 miles (10,700 km) respectively. The second Venus flyby in August of this year took BepiColombo as close as 340 miles (550 kilometers) to the planet’s surface. However, due to Venus’ high reflectiveness, the images were overexposed and didn’t reveal any detail.
Key moments during BepiColombo’s first Mercury flyby on 1 October 2021, which will see the spacecraft pass within 200 km of the planet. (Image credit: ESA)
Will we spot Mercury’s mysterious hollows?
BepiColombo project scientists at ESA Johannes Benkhoff told Space.com in an August interview that he expected Mercury to provide a much better photo opportunity than the probe’s past flybys. The spacecraft will be incredibly close to the planet’s surface and Mercury is dark, unlike Venus, so there should not be any overexposure problems.
“We hope that even with our selfie cameras, we may identify some structures on the surface of Mercury,” Benkhoff said.
The team would be particularly keen to spot the so-called hollows on Mercury, mysterious dents on the planet’s surface first discovered by NASA’s Messenger probe. Not seen on any other planet in the solar system, these hollows might be caused by evaporation of material from inside Mercury, scientists believe, and might be an indication that the moon-sized planet is much more active than previously thought.
“The interesting thing is that these hollows appear to be fairly recent,” Benkhoff said in an ESA statement. “It appears that there is some volatile material coming up from the outer layer of Mercury and sublimating into the surrounding space, leaving behind these strange features.”
This high-resolution view of Mercury from NASA’s Messenger spacecraft shows hollows — the irregularly shaped, flat-floored depressions — on the southwestern peak ring of the Scarlatti basin. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Still four years to go
After tonight’s close pass, it will take four more flybys of Mercury by BepiColombo before the spacecraft is in the correct position to finally enter the planet’s orbit, which is set to happen in 2025.
Mercury’s orbit is notoriously difficult for a spacecraft to reach. Although Earth is on average ten times closer to Mercury than to Jupiter, missions aiming for orbits around those planets take about the same time. The reason for that is that a mission to Mercury needs to constantly brake against the gravitational pull of the sun.
The spacecraft could brake using its thrusters, but the amount of fuel it would need would make such a mission technically nearly impossible. The spacecraft therefore follows a much longer route that takes advantage of the gravitational pull of celestial bodies to gradually slow down.
A mission to Mercury has some extra technical hurdles to overcome. Orbiting at about a third of the sun-Earth distance, Mercury is extremely hot. The two BepiColombo orbiters will have to handle temperatures of nearly 932 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), which would melt conventional spacecraft solar panels, ESA said in a statement.
BepiColombo’s next flyby at Mercury will take place in June 2023. Four additional flybys at the planet will follow, none as close as the one today. In December 2025, the spacecraft will be finally ready to enter Mercury’s orbit. The two orbiters will then separate and each will start its own scientific investigation.
Full of mysteries
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It will probably be only after the BepiColombo orbiters begin their separate missions in orbit above Mercury that scientists will learn more about the nature of the planet’s surface hollows. By that time, 10 years will have passed since the demise of Messenger, and the teams hope they will be able to compare high-resolution images from both spacecraft and detect changes on the surface.
“If we prove that these hollows are changing, that would be one of the most fantastic results we could get with BepiColombo,” Benkhoff said in the statement. “The process driving the creation of these hollows is totally unknown. It might be caused by heat or by solar particles bombarding the surface of the planet. It’s something completely new and everyone is looking forward to getting more data.”
But there are other fascinating questions about the small seemingly lifeless planet at the heart of our solar system. In spite of the scorching temperatures, Mercury seems to harbor ice in shaded craters around its poles. It also has a magnetic field, which scientists would not expect it to have due to its small size. Scientists are also puzzled by the planet’s chemical composition, which suggests it may not have formed this close to the sun but may have been thrown there by a violent cosmic collision. Many questions to answer for BepiColombo, and tonight’s flyby is set to provide only the tiniest taster of the science to come.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
