After passing Mercury at altitudes below 200 kilometers (200 kilometers), the probe took a low-resolution black-and-white photo with one of its monitoring cameras before closing again.
The European Space Agency said the captured image shows the characteristic features of the northern hemisphere and Mercury, such as the 166-kilometer-wide (103-kilometer-wide) Lermontov crater.
BepiColombo, of British construction, received its first vision of Mercury when it rotated less than 125 kilometers from the innermost planet in the solar system last night
The joint mission of the European agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice after Venus on its journey to the smallest planet in the solar system.
The joint mission of the European agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice after Venus on its journey to the smallest planet in the solar system.
The mission aims to deliver two orbits into orbit in 2025.
Five more flybys are needed before BepiColombo is reduced enough to release ESA’s Planetary Mercury Orbiter and JAXA’s Magnetospheric Mercury Orbiter.
The two probes will study the core and Mercury processes on its surface, as well as its magnetic sphere.
The goal is to better understand the origin, the processes currently in operation, and the evolution of the planet closest to our parent star.
Traveling the 67 million miles to enter orbit around Mercury is no small task, as they require several adjsutments to accelerate or slow down orbital insertion.
Gravitational flyers require extremely precise deep space navigation work, which ensures that the spacecraft is on the correct approach trajectory.
The spacecraft’s cameras are positioned so that they capture their solar arrays and antennas, and as the probe changes direction during the flyby, Mercury was seen passing behind the spacecraft’s structural elements.
It is possible to identify large impact craters on the planet’s surface in the photo published by ESA.
Mercury has a strongly cratered surface, similar to the appearance of the Earth’s Moon, which plots its 4.6 billion years of history.
Mapping the surface of Mercury and analyzing its composition will help scientists understand more about its formation and evolution.
Although BepiColombo is in a “stacked” cruise configuration for flybys, it will be possible to operate some of the scientific instruments in both planetary orbiters, allowing a first taste of the planet’s magnetic, plasma and particle environment.
The mission is named after Italian scientist Giuseppe ‘Bepi’ Colombo, who is credited with developing the gravity assistance maneuver that NASA’s Mariner 10 first used when it flew to Mercury in 1974.
It includes the ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, which will study all aspects of the planet, from its core to surface processes, the magnetic field and its exosphere.
Mapping the surface of Mercury and analyzing its composition will help scientists understand more about its formation and evolution.
Colombo is known to explain the peculiar feature of Mercury from rotating around its own axis three times in every two orbits of the Sun.
He also realized that if the overflight point of a spacecraft was carefully chosen when passing in front of a planet, the gravity of the planet could help the spacecraft to fly.
His interplanetary calculations allowed NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft to get three Mercury flyers instead of one using a Venus overflight to change the spacecraft’s flight path.
The BepiColombo mission will build on the achievements of its predecessors to provide the best understanding of the innermost planet in the solar system to date.
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