The half Japanese and half European satellite is all set on its way to a completely different place. And this different place is really far away, on a different planet, which is none other than Venus. The satellite is on its way to find life or at least phosphine in the atmosphere of the planet.
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In case if you missed the news that came a few days ago, the presence of phosphine has been found on Venus’s atmosphere. It is an entirely unusual fact to get the presence of this gas in the atmosphere of Venus, because on earth, we either make it through some man made chemical reactions or through decaying the organic matters. And other than these two, the only left source was the gas known by us were Deep inside gas giants.
There are very less number of chemical engineers performing advanced studies. However, as we all are aware that Venus is not wholly made up of gas. Also it isn’t possible that there’ll be decaying organic matter on its surface because Venus’ atmosphere is very thick. Thus, there’s no confirmation from where does this phosphine come from.
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Mercury-bound probe will go past the planet on 15th October 2020. For the first time when it will pass the planet the distance between them will be 10,663km. However the satellite will be as close as 550km to Venus in August 2021.
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The MERTIS (Mercury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer) on BepiColombo is made in such a way that it’ll measure the content of light that reflects from the upper layer of the planet. Thus, it’ll use the MERTIS to determine the presence of phosphine on the atmosphere and several other things.