Joint Euro-Japan spacecraft BepiColombo got its first view of Mercury, completed one of six flybys

This image made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows planet Mercury taken by the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft Mercury Transfer Module’s Monitoring Camera 2, Friday, Oct. 1, 2021. (ESA via AP)[/caption]The European Space Agency said the captured image shows the Northern Hemisphere and Mercury’s characteristic pock-marked features, among them the 166-kilometer-wide (103-mile-wide) Lermontov crater.The joint mission by the European agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and twice past Venus on its journey to the solar system’s smallest planet.Five further flybys are needed before BepiColombo is sufficiently slowed down to release ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. The two probes will study Mercury’s core and processes on its surface, as well as its magnetic sphere.The mission is named after Italian scientist Giuseppe ‘Bepi’ Colombo, who is credited with helping develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA’s Mariner 10 first used when it flew to Mercury in 1974.