On April 10, the BepiColombo spacecraft passed through Earth en route to the inner Solar System – and in the process captured some quite spectacular images of our planet.
The joint European-Japanese mission, which includes two orbits, is on a seven-year mission to enter orbit around Mercury in December 2025, having been launched from Earth in October 2018.
To reach Mercury, the spacecraft must lose energy as it heads towards the Sun to be captured by that planet’s gravity. To do this, it is using gravitational tugs from Earth, Venus and Mercury to slow it down.
On Friday, April 10 at 4:25 pm – UTC, the spacecraft completed the first of these flights, less than 8,000 miles from our planet – with most of the mission team watching at home. In doing so, it took time to test its various scientific instruments and obtain some images.
These images, many thousands of kilometers away, reveal some unique views of our planet suspended in space, as the spacecraft approaches more than 100,000 kilometers per hour. The flyover will cause the spacecraft to lose about 18,000 kilometers per hour in speed.
In an interesting coincidence, the probe flew directly over the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka, with which it shares its name, although the name of the probe actually comes from the Italian mathematician Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo.
BepiColombo’s trajectory will now plunge into the internal Solar System. Its next flyby will be Venus on October 15 this year, followed by another Venus flyby in August 2021, followed by six Mercurio flights, before going into orbit.
The mission is expected to provide us with an entirely new view of Mercury. Only two spacecraft have been on Mercury before – NASA’s Mariner 10, which flew in 1974 and 1975, and NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015.
With its set of instruments, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (ESA) of the European Space Agency (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) of the Japanese Space Agency will study Mercury from polar orbits, allowing them to see the entire planet spin under them.
In addition to mapping and studying the planet’s surface and interior, the two spacecraft will also be looking for intriguing signs of water ice in the shaded craters at the planet’s poles – with some evidence that Mercury could even have been habitable.
For now, however, BepiColombo said goodbye to Earth for the last time. Now she is on a daring dive towards the Sun, on a journey that will eventually see her orbit the innermost planet in our Solar System.
Until then, we will have to settle for its impressive images of the third rock from the Sun.
