The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission performed Mercury’s second gravity assist, snapping new close-up photos As it approaches the planet’s orbit in 2025.
The closest approach occurred at 0944 UTC on June 23, 2022, at an altitude of 200 km above the surface of the planet. Images were collected from the spacecraft’s three surveillance cameras (MCAMs) during the encounter, along with scientific data from a number of instruments.
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“We have completed the second of six Mercury flights and will return next year for a third time before reaching Mercury orbit in 2025,” Emanuela Bordoni, ESA Deputy Director of Spacecraft Operations, Emanuela Bordoni, said in a statement.
Because the closest approach to BepiColombo was on the night side of the planet, The first images in which Mercury lights up were taken about five minutes after approach, at a distance of about 800 kilometers. The images were taken 40 minutes after a close approach as the spacecraft moved away from the planet again.
As BepiColombo flies from night to day, the sun appears to rise above the crater-ridden surface of the planet, casting shadows along the dividing line, the boundary between night and day, highlighting the topography of the terrain in a dramatic way.
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The images show beautiful details of Mercury, including the Heaney crater, 125 km wide and covered in soft volcanic plains. It contains a rare example of a filter volcano on Mercury, which would be a prime target for a high-resolution BepiColombo image set once in orbit.
Just minutes away from the closest approach and with the sun shining from above, Mercury’s biggest impact feature, the 1.550 km-long Caloris Basin. It first appeared widely, as the highly reflective lava on the floor makes it stand out against the dark background. Lava in and around Caloris is believed to have reshaped the same basin by about a hundred million years, and measuring and understanding the compositional differences between them is an important goal of Baby Colombo.
“Images from Mercury flyby 1 were good, but images from flyby 2 are even better,” said David Rothery of The Open University, who leads ESA’s Mercury Surface and Composition Working Group and is also a member of the MCAM team. “The images highlight many scientific goals that we can address when BepiColombo goes into orbit. I want to understand the volcanic and tectonic history of this amazing planet.”
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BepiColombo will be based on data collected by NASA’s Messenger mission that orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. The two science orbits BepiColombo, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, will operate from complementary orbits. To study all aspects of the mysterious Mercury, from its basic to surface processes, the magnetic field and the exosphere, to better understand the origin and evolution of a nearby planet. for his mother’s star.
Although BepiColombo is currently in a ‘stacked’ cruise configuration, which means that many instruments cannot be fully operated during short flights, it is still able to obtain information about the magnetic environment, plasma and particles around the spacecraft, From nonexistent places normally accessible during an orbital mission. .
The initial science mission BepiColombo will begin in early 2026. It uses nine planetary flights in total — one on Earth, two on Venus and six on Mercury — along with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, to help target Mercury’s orbit. The next flight from Mercury will take place on June 20, 2023.
European press
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