European Space Agency's (ESA) BepiColombo spacecraft made a close flyby to Mercury Monday. The goal was to reduce its speed to enter the planet's orbit.
ESA's Mercury Probe BepiColombo
The spacecraft zipped past the planet at a super-close distance of just 147 miles (236 kilometers) at 3:34 p.m., marking BepiColombo's third flyby of Mercury. GMT: 19:34 EDT. That is closer than the two orbiters of the probe will get throughout its primary mission, Space.com reported.
However, the primary objective of the flyby is not to get breathtaking close-ups of Mercury's surface but rather to use Mercury's gravity to slow down the probe so that it may enter the planet's orbit in late 2025.
The spacecraft was launched from Earth and is orbiting the sun like our planet. Thus it started with far too much energy. They need to slow down to be captured by Mercury, and they are doing that by utilizing the gravitational pull of Earth, Venus, and Mercury, according to ESA flight dynamics expert Frank Budnik.
Mercury, the innermost planet, is often ten times closer to Earth than Jupiter. However, it still takes the same amount of time to get there because a spaceship headed for Mercury must constantly brake against the strong gravitational attraction of the sun.
BepiColombo, a spacecraft launched in 2018, is making predicted flybys of planets as it travels around the sun. Before this, the probe passed Mercury twice, in October 2021 and July 2022. The spacecraft had already made two trips to Venus and one to Earth.
BepiColombo will be moving away from Mercury at a speed of 3.6 km/s (2.2 miles per second) when it begins to feel its gravitational attraction. According to Budnik, that is just over half the speed it approached during the last two Mercury flybys. The flyby will result in a further 0.5 miles per second (0.8 km/s) decrease in the spacecraft's velocity magnitude relative to the sun and a 2.6-degree change in direction.
BepiColombo will fly past Mercury three more times before it slows down enough to be grabbed by the rocky planet, which is only slightly more significant than the moon, in September 2024, December 2024, and January 2025.
It also presents a novel opportunity to compare with data obtained by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft during its 2011-2015 mission at Mercury from complementary locations around the planet that are not usually accessible from orbit. Collecting data during flybys is extremely valuable for the science teams to check their instruments are functioning correctly ahead of the main mission, said Johannes Benkhoff, BepiColombo project scientist at ESA.
What Is BepiColombo?
The BepiColombo mission is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It is only the third spacecraft in history to observe Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet, which is notoriously challenging to study.
It is the most sophisticated probe ever to visit Mercury, the solar system's least-explored planet.
BepiColombo was launched on Oct. 20, 2018, and is en route to Mercury. It already did three flybys, and three more are scheduled until it enters Mercury's orbit. It is expected to arrive at Mercury on Dec. 5, 2025.
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