European Mercury spacecraft passes test

http://timesofearth.com/ PARIS -- The European Space Agency says its Mercury mission spacecraft has been tested in a simulator capable of reproducing the planet's extreme environment.

The agency's Large Space Simulator, where the BepiColombo Mercury mapping craft was tested at more than 660 degrees Fahrenheit, is the most powerful in the world, an agency release said Wednesday.

The spacecraft, when in orbit around Mercury, will encounter 10 times the radiation power received by a satellite in orbit around Earth and, to simulate this, the simulator at an ESA facility in the Netherlands had to be specially adapted, the agency said.

Engineers measure the power of the sun in units called the solar constant, the amount of energy received every second through a square meter (slightly larger than a square yard) of space at the distance of Earth's orbit.

"Previously, the LSS was capable of simulating a solar constant of two. Now it has been upgraded to produce ten solar constants," Jan van Casteren, the agency's BepiColombo project manager, said.

Once at Mercury, most of the sun's heat will be prevented from entering BepiColombo by special thermal blankets with multiple layers, including a white ceramic outer layer, and several metallic layers to reflect as much heat as possible back into space.

Source: UPI

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