NASA Signs On To European-Japanese Mercury Mission: BepiColombo Will Map Planet, Measure Gases, Ice, Interior

NASA is going to Mercury.  NASA has signed on to a mission with BepiColombo in conjunction with the European Space Agency to explore Mercury.

The dual-orbiter mission is a collaboration between European and Japanese space agencies.

NASA's U.S contribution will be an instrument called Strofio that will measure the fragile, shifting envelope of gases around Mercury, the most central planet in the solar system.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden signed the agreement to join the BepiColombo mission on Thursday. The mission is already underway via the European Space Agency. Enrico Saggese, current president of the Italian Space Agency, also signed the agreement.

The BepiColombo Mercury mission will consist of two spacecraft that will orbit Mercury and map the planet at multiple wavelengths. The Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) "will chart the planet's mineralogy and elemental composition, determine whether the interior of the planet is molten or not, and investigate the extent and origin of Mercury's magnetic field," according to NASA's website.

One goal of the Mercury  mission is to learn how rocky planets, including Earth, formed in the early solar system. This knowledge could lend to the study of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

NASA's contribution is estimated at $32 million, and total mission costs are about $1 billion.

The European Space Agency will provide their Mercury Planetary Orbiter, known at MPO. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA,  is building  the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).

All of the satellites will launch in conjunction on an Ariane 5 rocket in August 2015. It will take them about six years to finally reach Mercury.

Because Mercury is so close to the Sun, which is much brighter, it's hard to study. And spending a spaceship there is difficult; the Sun's gravity makes it hard to steer and land any probes or other instruments.

In the past, NASA's Mariner 10 visited Mercury, first flying by on three occasions during 1974 and 1975 after visiting Venus. The Mariner 10 captured photographs of Mercury's surface and was able to decipher that it had a minimal magnetic field, very little atmosphere, and an iron-rich core.

Much later in 2008 and 2009, NASA's Messenger flew past Mercury three times. It later orbited the planet in 2011. Messenger found water ice on the planet Mercury's North pole, which faces away from the sun. Scientists believe 1.1 trillion tons of ice may currently be frozen on Mercury.. Messenger is still circling the planet.