After successfully completing its maiden flyby around Mercury last year, the BepiColomobo spacecraft is set for another close approach to the closest planet to the Sun. The spacecraft will conduct the second flyby on June 23 coming as close as 200 km altitude above the planet’s surface.
The spacecraft is on a course to conduct a total of six such flybys around the innermost planet of the solar system before entering Mercury’s orbit in 2025. The primary purpose of the flyby is to fine-tune BepiColombo’s trajectory to ensure that it is on the proper course for extensive and lengthy research for future missions.
Developed jointly by the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, the spacecraft grabs an incredible taste of Mercury science to boost our understanding and knowledge of the Solar System’s innermost planet. The probe will capture new images of the surface while a number of the magnetic, plasma, and particle monitoring instruments will sample the environment from both near and far from the planet in the hours around the close approach.
The flyby is aimed at providing a gravitational slingshot around Mercury and lowering the orbit bringing it closer to the planet. ESA has said that the latest flyby will slow down the spacecraft by 1.3 kilometers per second.
“Even during fleeting flybys, these science ‘grabs’ are extremely valuable. We get to fly our world-class science laboratory through diverse and unexplored parts of Mercury’s environment that we won’t have access to once in orbit, while also getting a head start on preparations to make sure we will transition into the main science mission as quickly and smoothly as possible,” Johannes Benkhoff, ESA’s BepiColombo project scientist said in a statement.
“We have three slots available to perform correction manoeuvres from ESA’s ESOC Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany, in order to be in precisely the right place at the right time to use Mercury’s gravity as we need it,” explains Elsa Montagnon, Mission Manager for BepiColombo.
While it is not possible to take high-definition images during the flyby, with the main science camera because it is shielded, the spacecraft will use three monitoring cameras (MCAMs) to take selfies with Mercury.
