D1.3 BepiColombo – The State of Art for the Exploration of Mercury

Symposium: D1. IAF SPACE SYSTEMS SYMPOSIUM
Session: 3 – Technologies to Enable Space Systems
Room: 145B
Time: 14:45

BepiColombo represents the first European mission to explore the planet Mercury, so far visited only by NASA.
With BepiColombo, an Interdisciplinary Mission to the planet Mercury, in collaboration between ESA and ISAS/JAXA of Japan, the ESA’s goal is to carry out a complete and systematic mapping of the planet.
It might be thought that Mercury has so far been a bit neglected by space explorations because it is less interesting than Mars, Venus or Saturn, already visited by previous scientific ESA missions, but is not so.
The reason lies in the fact that Mercury is an extreme difficult planet to explore, due to its extraordinarily hostile environment in terms of thermal radiations, ultraviolet and ionized particles flow.
This paper intends to give an overview of the BepiColombo Mission characteristics, objectives, challenges, together with a summary of the technology development and effort that has been required in particular to Thales Alenia Space – Italy, to develop and qualify such complex Satellite.