BepiColombo's 1st Views of Mercury
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby last night.
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The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has captured its first views of its destination planet Mercury as it swooped past in a close gravity assist flyby last night.
The two probes will study Mercury’s core and processes on its surface, as well as its magnetic sphere.
BepiColombo became the third spacecraft to reach Mercury after Mariner-10 (1975) and Messenger (2011), the latter ended its operational services in 2015.
The closest of images were taken from an altitude of 1000km above the planet’s surface and pack an astonishing amount of detail.
A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system’s innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025. The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34 p.m. GMT (7:34 p.m. EST) Friday, using the planet’s gravity to…