MERCURY MISSION: “I’M GLAD WE’RE GOING BACK!”

What will you be doing in preparation ahead of BepiColombo’s arrival at Mercury in 2025?

My role on the MIXS team is to help prepare to make the best observations that we can. MIXS’ role towards understanding Mercury’s surface and composition is to map all the chemical elements it can, and there are some targets which MIXS will try to stare at, making sure it’s collecting observations when it’s over these critical targets where we think the composition is unusual. MIXS will map the whole planet, but some small areas need special attention – places where there have been volcanic explosions, or regions called ‘hollows’, which is where the surface is dissipating away to space. At the present day we think the surface is rotting away. We have very limited compositional measurements of these features from the previous mission, MESSENGER. [BepiColombo] will get much better spatial resolution with the X-ray spectrometer then we’ve achieved before. We’re going to make sure we know in advance where these are and build them into the data-collection schedule for arrival to be sure that it’s collecting data when it’s over the right targets. I’m making sure that MIXS will collect