It seems like it should be pretty easy to get to Mercury. The little rocky planet is so much closer to Earth than distant destinations like Jupiter, where we've successfully sent multiple spacecraft. Plus, it doesn't have a crushing atmosphere like our nearest neighbor Venus. But, in fact, it's actually really difficult to reach the innermost planet of our solar system--which makes it that much more impressive that the ESA and JAXA's BepiColombo mission has almost reached Mercury, recently completing its final flyby of the planet before entering orbit next year. Reaching Mercury is such a challenge because "the gravitational pull of the Sun is very strong near Mercury, which makes it difficult for spacecraft to slow down enough to enter orbit around the planet," explains Lina Hadid, staff scientist at CNRS in France and principal investigator of one of BepiColombo's instruments.

Mercury Systems, Inc., a leader in trusted, secure mission-critical technologies for aerospace and defense, announced it received a $4.7 million order from a leading defense prime contractor to provide artificial intelligence (AI) processing technology for integration into an advanced airborne electro-optic system. The order was booked in the Company's fiscal 2020 third quarter and is expected to be shipped over the next several quarters. "Mercury solutions are designed to be the most rugged, durable and highest performing available to meet the rigorous demands of military and commercial customers," said Joe Plunkett, Mercury's Vice President and General Manager for Mercury's Sensor Processing group. "Our ability to provide datacenter-quality processing architecture in an embedded solution allows our customers to quickly extract critical information from electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) imagery using the latest AI techniques. This technology underscores our commitment to Innovation That Matters by enabling our military to see further and with greater clarity, giving them a decisive edge in all tactical situations."

Mercury Systems, Inc. today unveiled the EnterpriseSeries RES AI rugged rackmount server line, bringing High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities to aerospace, defense and other mission-critical applications at the edge. "The proliferation of sensors, ever-growing data loads and the evolution of complex deep learning neural networks continues to increase computational demands, driving the need for supercomputing infrastructure closer to the edge," said Scott Orton, Vice President and General Manager of Mercury's Trusted Mission Solutions group. "Through close collaboration with technology leaders such as NVIDIA and Intel, we've developed reliable parallel computing systems that accelerate demanding artificial intelligence (AI), signal intelligence (SIGINT), and sensor fusion applications where it's needed the most." Why it Matters: Evolving compute-intensive AI, virtualization, big data analytics, SIGINT, autonomous vehicle, Electronic Warfare (EW) and sensor fusion applications require data center supercomputing capabilities closer to the source of data origin. Delivering HPC capabilities to the edge presents challenges as every application has its own security, performance, footprint, budget and reliability requirements.