BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury
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First, as to why colonize Mercury, there are some really good reasons:
1. Cheap, abundant energy (ie solar);
2. Access to tons of raw materials, particularly metals;
3. Relatively low gravity means getting into orbit is relatively low cost.
A few people have stated we'd hide in a crater as a negative. We'd live underground probably in submerged habitats that spin to produce Earth-like gravity, just as we would have to on Mars and the Moon.
For Mars in particular, people have this romantic notion of living on the surface. We wouldn't. There's essentially no atmosphere. Worse than no atmosphere actually there's just enough to cover all your gear in dust and do little else for you. You still have to worry about radiation. Terraforming is a monstrously massive project that would take millenia.
The biggest negative to Mercury is how hard it is to reach from Earth. Fun fact: the delta-V required to reach Mercury from Earth is more than that to escape the Solar System (eg like New Horizons). There's a reason this probe is taking 7 years to get there and doing multiple gravity brakes along the way (watch the ESA animation [1]).
If you're going to bootstrap a Dyson Swarm, Mercury is almost the perfect place to do it from.
[1]: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2017/07/Animation_...
1. The amount of planning that is required for this is just astounding to me. That we can pretty trivially plan to use something like planetary motion as a motor is fascinating.
2. I'm really bad at Kerbal Space Program.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27741738 https://www.universetoday.com/128531/terraform-mercury/
People collectively do hard things when they are profitable.
Profitability here in most broad sense possible. US did not send men to Moon because it was hard. It was done because US was in a race with USSR and winning that race was profitable to US.
Having public opinion excited about some goal can be profitable, too.
If you don't believe, think about it: why has Apollo program been stopped? Because people got used to it and there was nothing further to prove -- further sanding people to Moon after US has demonstrated it can do it repeatedly was extremely expensive but there were no longer any significant profits from it.
So while it was still hard it actually became unprofitable to continue to do so.
If it was hard that caused US to send people to Moon, they would not stop sending people, they would be sending more, build base on Moon, etc.
Why do that if you have billions of flying bodies in much more convenient places flying around the Sun waiting to be docked to to extract resources?
1) This imagines only that there is no reason to extract minerals that far into the solar system.
2) It ignores that some technologies are much improved by proximity to the Sun, e.g.: Solar Sails are roughly twice as effective, which could change the calculus.
3) Mineral deposits may or may not be uniformly distributed throughout the solar system.
4) Mineral deposits may be more readily accessible than in other places.
> Why do that if you have billions of flying bodies in much more convenient places flying around the Sun waiting to be docked to to extract resources?
A space mining operation would need to offset a variety of costs. If you can land on Mercury and scrape up platinum powder with a shovel versus needing to completely process a 1-km long asteroid to get the same amount of platinum, it's not exactly de facto in favor of the asteroid.
Mineral surveying of nearby asteroids is certainly in its infancy and is likely to be where we get the bulk of our resources but I don't think it's quite so simple a case as you're presenting that closer to the sun = waste of time/money.
Mercury itself is light enough to cancel that out.
No, it does not cancel it out.
You need about 12km/s delta V to get to Mercury from Earth and then the same to get back. Remember, if you need to lift anything from Mercury, you need to actually transport fuel TO Mercury, before you can use it to lift anything out of Mercury.
And you don't just need twice more fuel for twice more delta-V. The fuel requirements grow exponentially.
Now imagine, how poor idea it is to transport mountains of fuel to Mercury just to get a tiny bit of what exactly? Raw materials? What kind of raw materials are present on Mercury that would warrant it?
For example, if you wanted to build a base on Mars using resources that you obtained somewhere else, it would actually require many times more fuel to get anything from Mercury than it would be to get it from Earth surface.
Tell me, how putting actual human on Mercury helps building a megastructure? It is not like they will be able to do shit while on the surface of Mercury. They would be just sitting idle in a single polar crater that happens to be shaded from Sun and have access to water. Then if you want to send anything to an orbit where you would want to build Dyson sphere you would actually have to expend more energy than if you tried to send it from surface of Earth. That makes absolutely no sense.
I think these types of megastructures will be built by swarms of autonomous drone ships that can collectively gather, transform and deliver resources, use gathered resources to produce more drones and use the rest of resources to build whatever megastructure has been programmed in.
- It is extremely metals and mineral rich, perfect for building the billions of giant mirrors required for a Dyson swarm.
-It's already really close to the sun, so you don't need as much energy to get your mirrors in a lower solar orbit, compared to earth.
-Because it's close to the sun, it receives a lot more energy too, which can be used to power machine and...
-It has no atmosphere and little gravity, so the swarm can be launched with simple electromagnetic mass drivers.
-It has plenty of water, so the few human operators required to control the machines remotely in real-time can live very comfortably at the poles (or in deep trenches in lower latitudes).
I agree that human colonization of Mercury is going to remain very limited, only because of the trouble of landing there. But you won't find a better planet to mine and launch billions of mirrors.
The history of that university is pretty amazing. I can't recommend the tour enough, if people go through Padova. It's a nice change from all the churches, castles and villas that you see elsewhere in Europe.
Because there is no erosion mechanism on Mercury (except for crumbling due to temperature changes) these craters were preserved perfectly.
What a strange mission. Why can’t it stay in orbit around Mercury now?
Your house is high up the valley but you actually live thirty feet deep in a pit. To get to Mercury you have to build a car, lift it out the pit, then slide down the steep valley. The car has to be lightweight so that you can lift it out the pit: the engine and brakes are weak and do next to nothing.
So you build a feeble car — more of a four wheeled bicycle really, hoist it out the pit, and slide down the valley in it. By the time you whizz past Mercury you’re doing 100mph so you can’t stop. You go straight past and start sliding up the other side, but you do also put the brakes on for a bit. You’ll eventually slide back down to Mercury again at 90mph and put the brakes on again, and slow down a little more.
Do this ~10x and you’ll eventually stop.
Going in the other direction is easier. Earth is surrounded in a 100km soft squishy cushion of gas which means to all intents and purposes you can just fly straight at it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Research_with...
If you play KSP and would like a challenge much closer to real rocketry, check out the Realism Overhaul mod—and don't forget Principia. For an actual campaign based on the Apollo program, starting in 1951, check out RP-1 (Realistic Progression).
* Kerbol is the name of the star
It’s a bummer we don’t have better space propulsion systems, five years meandering about the inner solar system to get the right speed and angle to enter an orbit around mercury.
Hey! I used to work for the company that made BepiColombo's engines [0]
[0] https://www.qinetiq.com/en/news/pioneering-qinetiq-solar-ele...
Very cool!
[Edit] That and my liking for the Space Opera novels written by E.E. 'Doc' Smith.
Also, there appears to be a typo in one of the images near the bottom. "Lemontov" instead of "Lermontov".
comets came crashing down slower than one goes in a school zone?
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/10/BepiColomb...
Images using primary instruments will follow when it reaches orbit in 2025.
But why they're not just sticking an array of sensors everywhere they've got the b&w sensor, with fixed color filters in front of them, escapes me. Even smartphones are starting to look like insect eyes with the number of lenses in front of dedicated sensors. You'd also get the advantage of some redundancy.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/system/resources/detail_files/9...
Source: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker Published: July 23, 2018
This is the most accurate natural color images of Pluto taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.
These natural-color images result from refined calibration of data gathered by New Horizons' color Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The processing creates images that would approximate the colors that the human eye would perceive, bringing them closer to “true color” than the images released near the encounter.
This image was taken as New Horizons zipped toward Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, from a range of 22,025 miles (35,445) kilometers. This single color MVIC scan includes no data from other New Horizons imagers or instruments added. The striking features on Pluto are clearly visible, including the bright expanse of Pluto's icy, nitrogen-and-methane rich "heart," Sputnik Planitia.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/933/true-colors-of-pl...
Also, shocked context clues from the rest of the comment made you feel the whole thing was not tongue-in-cheek.
So most rocks are gray, unless they have been exposed to oxygen, which converts the black iron oxide into red iron oxide, in which case the rocks turn from some gray shade to some brown shade.
Where there has been water, the water could have been dissociated by light, providing oxygen for the change of color. In the absence of water, there are few chances for anything else that could change the color of the rocks from gray.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00750-2
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110331.html
Here's an image with exaggerated colours: