A European-Japanese spacecraft set off on a treacherous seven-year journey to Mercury to examine the solar system’s smallest and least-explored planet. MappedNasa’s Mariner 10 probe, launched to Mercury in 1973, mapped around 45 per cent of the planet’s surface, and its Messenger mission took off in 2004 to complete the survey. It will fly past Venus twice and then fly by Mercury six times before slipping into its orbit around December 2025. At that point, it will release two separate spacecraft it is carrying, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) will collect data on the planet’s magnetosphere.

Source: The Irish Times October 20, 2018 10:52 UTC