• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Japan Aims for First Landing on Mercury

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 June 2003, 06:00 CDT

By HANS GREIMEL

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan and the European Space are planning a joint mission that would be the first to land a probe on Mercury, a space official said Wednesday.

The mission entails three probes, two that would orbit and one that would land, to map the topography and study the origins of the closest planet to the sun, said Masahiko Sawabe of Japan's education and science ministry.

"This would be the first landing," Sawabe told The Associated Press. "If successful we will collect a lot of new scientific knowledge"

Mercury has only been visited by one probe - the U.S.-launched Mariner 10, which conducted three fly-bys from 1974 to 1975. NASA is planning to launch another orbiting probe, dubbed Messenger, sometime in 2004.

Russian Soyuz rockets will launch the probes in space shots starting in 2010. The probes would reach Mercury about four years later, with one of them landing on the planet, and the other two orbiting and charting its surface for a year.

To escape the searing heat of Mercury's rocky surface, where temperatures hit 872 degrees in the day, the probe will land on the dark side of the planet during the Mercury night. Temperatures plunge to minus 361 degrees then.

Japan will build one of the orbiting satellites; the Europeans the lander and the other orbiter.

Japan embarked on its first interplanetary exploration with the 1998 launching of its Nozomi, or Hope, probe to Mars. It has been plagued by technical problems and made its final flyby of the Earth just last week. It should reach the red planet by year's end.

For the Mercury venture, Japan would chip in $115 million and Europe would contribute $513 million, Sawabe said.

The goal of the mission is to study the planet's surface and environment and try to unlock the mysteries of how the planet evolved.

-----

On the Net:

Mercury information

More science, space, and technology from RedNova

Copyright © 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

More News in this Category