{"id":224840,"date":"2015-01-04T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"70124b8e12c0423621db0aeb54298255"},"modified":"2015-01-04T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T23:00:00","slug":"testing-esas-mercury-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=224840","title":{"rendered":"Testing ESA&#8217;s Mercury Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.esa.int\/var\/esa\/storage\/images\/esa_multimedia\/videos\/2015\/01\/testing_esa_s_mercury_mission\/15180280-1-eng-GB\/Testing_ESA_s_Mercury_Mission_small.jpg\" width=\"170\" height=\"96\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"8\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nEurope\u2019s Mercury mission is moved through ESA\u2019s ESTEC Test Centre in this new video, positioning it for testing inside the largest vacuum chamber in Europe, for a trial by vacuum.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBepiColombo, Europe\u2019s first mission to study Mercury, is a joint mission with Japan. Two spacecraft \u2013 the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter \u2013 will fly in two different paths around the planet to study it from complementary perspectives.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nFlight hardware for the mission is undergoing testing at ESA\u2019s Technical Centre, ESTEC, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the largest spacecraft test facility in Europe, to prepare for its 2016 launch.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe Mercury Planetary Orbiter was placed inside the chamber in late October for \u2018thermal\u2013vacuum\u2019 testing. It will sit in vacuum until early December, subjected to the equivalent temperature extremes that will be experienced in Mercury orbit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nLiquid nitrogen runs through the walls of the chamber to recreate the chill of empty space, while an array of lamps focuses simulated sunlight 10 times more intense than on Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.esa.int\/var\/esa\/storage\/images\/esa_multimedia\/videos\/2015\/01\/testing_esa_s_mercury_mission\/15180280-1-eng-GB\/Testing_ESA_s_Mercury_Mission_small.jpg\" width=\"170\" height=\"96\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"8\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nEurope\u2019s Mercury mission is moved through ESA\u2019s ESTEC Test Centre in this new video, positioning it for testing inside the largest vacuum chamber in Europe, for a trial by vacuum.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBepiColombo, Europe\u2019s first mission to study Mercury, is a joint mission with Japan. Two spacecraft \u2013 the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter \u2013 will fly in two different paths around the planet to study it from complementary perspectives.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nFlight hardware for the mission is undergoing testing at ESA\u2019s Technical Centre, ESTEC, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the largest spacecraft test facility in Europe, to prepare for its 2016 launch.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe Mercury Planetary Orbiter was placed inside the chamber in late October for \u2018thermal\u2013vacuum\u2019 testing. It will sit in vacuum until early December, subjected to the equivalent temperature extremes that will be experienced in Mercury orbit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nLiquid nitrogen runs through the walls of the chamber to recreate the chill of empty space, while an array of lamps focuses simulated sunlight 10 times more intense than on Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-multimedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}