BepiColombo probe swings by Earth on way to Mercury – the Solar System's must-visit coronavirus-free resort BepiColombo, the first European-Japanese spacecraft to hopefully orbit Mercury, has swung by Earth for its first gravitational assist maneuver in its seven-year journey to the innermost planet of our Solar System. It passed by our home world on Friday, reaching a minimum distance of about 12,700 kilometers from the surface; …
“[The] eclipse phase was the most delicate part of the flyby, with the spacecraft passing through the shadow of our planet and not receiving any direct sunlight for the first time after launch,” said Elsa Montagnon, ESA's BepiColombo Spacecraft Operations Manager.
Good news! The probe will soon be receiving a great deal of sunlight on its panels :)
Just watched the video on the esa website showing the crafts route, that is a phenomenal amount of calculations to get that calculated.
Some people can’t even find there way to work without a satnav (I did hear a story years ago that someone had a car with a satnav, it went in for a service and they were given a loan car without the satnav, they then got lost on the way to the place they had worked for a couple of years...)
Truly amazing.
To think that, in today's world of instant gratification and utter dearth of patience, there are still people that can work on a project for more than a decade to get it off the ground (literally in this case), and plan to wait over half a decade before getting results.
We need more people like that.
I know, right?
As an idiot in his 20s, I quit electronic engineering, where projects were six months to two years away from design to manufacture, for newspaper journalism, where articles were 30 minutes to three hours away from filing to editing, layout, and printing, because it was more exciting.
A relative works for an automaker and she talks of one to three year lead times for minor design changes.
C.
Clearly a non-trivial exercise in planetary and orbital dynamics. Your high-school physics won't cut it here, as you definitely require the use of General Relativity rather than Newtonian gravity so close to the sun (and deeper into any gravitational well too, of course).
Looking forward to the results in half a decade's time.
I'll raise a glass or two to the ongoing success of this mission
This paper assumes that General Relativity wasn't taken into account when plotting the course, and predicts that the final pass off Venus could be off by ~8x105km.
No idea if they're correct or not.
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BepiColombo was named after Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo, an Italian scientist and mathematician who in 1970 proposed a route that allowed NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft to make not just one flyby of Mercury but three. Colombo used gravitational slingshot calculations from the Soviet Luna 3 missions, ensuring the Mariner became the first spacecraft to exploit a planet's mass – Venus in this case – for a gravity assist.
Yeah but did he star as a plucky woman in a man's world in a movie? No? Then that's why we don't care about him.
Cameron Diaz has been cast as 'Boopi' and will be playing the role of a ditzy Italian-American scientist who works out a complicated 4 dimensional flight-path using a slide rule, lotsa spaghetti and some shagging.
Directed by Paul Feig and co-staring Melissa McCarthy (for no particular reason).
Get ready to down vote the trailer on YouTube© soon.
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