The spacecraft thus gains a first glimpse of the planet that it will study intensively from 2025.

Tonight at half past two BepiColombo will skim past Mercury. The probe will approach the planet as far as 198 kilometers. Astronomers are on the edge of their seats; the images and data that BepiColombo will collect during the flyby provide an insight into what we can expect from this beautiful mission after 2025.

shaving flights

BepiColombo has been on its way to Mercury since October 2018. But getting the mission into orbit requires nine flybys: one over Earth, two over Venus and six over Mercury. The orbits of Earth and Venus are already over and now it’s time for the first flyby of Mercury.

photos

And in doing so, BepiColombo will get a first glimpse of a planet that still has a lot of secrets from us. And we can watch a bit; BepiColombo will also take pictures. However, they will not be very spectacular; the high-resolution camera cannot be used during the journey, so we have to make do with three cameras that are actually designed to capture BepiColombo itself and monitor the condition of the probe. These cameras can only take black-and-white photos, with a resolution of 1024 by 1024. What also doesn’t help is that BepiColombo skims the night side of Mercury. When the probe is closest to Mercury, the conditions for photographing the planet are therefore not very favorable. The best pictures will therefore be taken from a distance of 1000 kilometers.

Craters

Those photos – which will also feature BepiColombo’s solar panels and antennas – are expected to arrive on Earth on Saturday. And while they will be shot from quite a distance and not the best cameras, it is expected that some surface features will still be visible. For example, it should be possible to spot the larger craters found on Mercury’s surface.

BepiColombo’s first flyby past Mercury in image (not to scale). Image: ESA.

Five more flybys to go

The better shots will have to wait a little longer; BepiColombo will not really arrive at Mercury until December 2025. In the run-up to that, five more flybys await past Mercury. These will take place in 2022, 2023, 2024 (twice) and 2025.

Once at Mercury, the spacecraft will release two orbiters; the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (of the European Space Agency) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (from the Japanese space agency). Together, the orbiters should provide more insight into Mercury’s composition, origin and evolution. The mission thus builds in many ways on the work of the only two space probes that have visited Mercury to date: Mariner 10 and MESSENGER.