UK technology blazes trail for groundbreaking BepiColombo Mercury mission

A UK-built instrument that will help astronomers discover the composition of the surface of the planet Mercury has been shipped from its developers at the University of Leicester to Airbus Space & Defence in Stevenage for integration into the spacecraft that will carry it into a low orbit around the closest planet to the Sun. The Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS) will fly on ESA’s Mercury probe, BepiColombo, in 2017.

Only the third craft to visit Mercury, BepiColombo is hoped to add to the knowledge gained by NASA’s probe, Messenger, which ended its ten-year mission (with four years in Mercury orbit) at the end of last month, when it used the last of its fuel to crash into the planet. Mercury unexpectedly discovered ice on the planet’s surface, in craters sheltered from the sun, and found evidence of volcanic activity, as well as producing data that allowed the most detailed maps of Mercury to date to be drawn up.