Source: Forbes

The joint European-Japanese mission, which includes two orbiters, is on a seven-year mission to enter orbit around Mercury in December 2025, having launched form Earth in October 2018.

In order to reach Mercury, the spacecraft must lose energy as it falls towards the Sun to be captured by the planet. To do so, it is using gravitational tugs of Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself to slow its speed.

This morning, Friday, April 10 at 4.25 A.M. UTC, the spacecraft completed the first of those flybys as it flew less than 13,000 kilometers from our planet – with most of the mission’s team watching on from home. As it did so, it took the time to test out its various scientific instruments and snap some images.

Those images, beginning many thousands of kilometers away, reveal some rather unique views of our planet suspended in space as the spacecraft approaches at more than 100,000 kilometers per hour. The flyby will cause the spacecraft to lose about 18,000 kilometers per hour in velocity.

In an interesting coincidence, the spacecraft flew directly over the city of Colombo in Sri Lanka that it shares its name with, although the spacecraft’s name actually comes from the Italian mathematician Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo.

BepiColombo’s trajectory will now dive into the inner Solar System. Its next flyby will be Venus on October 15 this year, followed by another Venus flyby in August 2021 followed by six Mercury flybys before it enters orbit.

The mission is expected to provide us with a whole new look at Mercury. Only two spacecraft have been to Mercury before – NASA’s Mariner 10, which flew past in 1974 and 1975, and NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015.

With their suite of instruments, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Japanese Space Agency’s (JAXA) Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) will study Mercury from polar orbits, allowing them to see the entire planet rotate underneath them.

As well as mapping and studying the surface and interior of the planet, the two spacecraft will also be looking for intriguing signs of water ice in the shadowed craters at the planet’s poles – with some evidence Mercury might even once have been habitable.

For now, however, BepiColombo has bid farewell to Earth for the last time. It is now on a daring dive towards the Sun, on a journey that will eventually see it orbit our Solar System’s innermost planet.

Until then we’ll have to make do with its impressive images of the third rock from the Sun.

Source: Forbes