ESA’s BepiColomo: Mercury mapper Tested in Space Simulator

Key components of the ESA-led Mercury mapper BepiColombo have been tested in a specially upgraded European space simulator.

ESA’s Large Space Simulator (LSS) is now the most powerful in the world and the only facility capable of reproducing Mercury’s hellish environment for a full-scale spacecraft.

The Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) has survived a simulated voyage to the innermost planet.

The octagonal spacecraft, which is Japan’s contribution to BepiColombo, and its ESA sunshield withstood temperatures higher than 350°C.

This is a taste of things to come for the spacecraft. BepiColombo will encounter fully ten times the radiation power received by a satellite in orbit around Earth and, to simulate this, the Large Space Simulator (LSS) at ESA’s ESTEC centre in the Netherlands had to be specially adapted.

Engineers talk about the power of the Sun in units called the solar constant. This is how much energy is received every second through a square metre of space at the distance of Earth’s orbit.

“Previously, the LSS was capable of simulating a solar constant or two. Now it has been upgraded to produce ten solar constants,” says Jan van Casteren, ESA BepiColombo project manager.