NASA Joins ESA's Mission to Mercury: The Future of Planetary Exploration

Forget about Mars; NASA may be sending a mission to a different planet--Mercury. The organization has joined up with the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to work on strengthening a mutually beneficial cooperation in planetary exploration.

While Mars is certainly much closer, Mercury also holds its appeal. Only slightly larger than Earth's moon, sun scorched Mercury is located close to the our nearest star---its egg-shaped orbit spins it around the sun once every 88 days. Possessing little atmosphere to stop impacts, the planet is pocked with craters from asteroids and other space debris. Despite this geography, it does hold an interesting interior. The planet is the second densest one after Earth with a large, metallic core that has a radius of about 1,100 to 1,200 miles.

The mission itself is actually called BepiColombo and will provide the best understanding of Mercury to date. It consists of two individual orbiters, including the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) to map the planet and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) to investigate its magnetosphere. Headed by the European Space agency, this mission will allow researchers to understand a little bit more about the planet that's the closest to the sun.

NASA has now signed onto this mission. At a meeting in Rome Thursday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and ASI President Enrico Saggesse signed a Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation on the ESA-led mission to Mercury. This has helped strengthen the cooperation between the various space agencies.

This particular cooperation, though, may be necessary. It will be difficult to send a mission to Mercury, mainly because its orbit is so close to the sun. The planet is hard to observe from a distance because the star is so bright, and a lot of energy will be lost during a spacecraft's "fall" toward the planet from Earth. The mission won't be cheap, either. The overall mission costs are about $1 billion, according to Discovery News. NASA will be contributing about $32 million total to the mission.

Currently, the mission is still being conceptualized, built and tested. Yet if it succeeds, it could mean that scientists will learn a lot more about the planet. In addition, it could set the stage for further planet exploration, allowing researchers to understand how our universe works.