The #ESA/#JAXA #BepiColombo spacecraft will makes its 3rd close flyby of #Mercury tomorrow at 19:34 UTC at an altitude of 236 km.
"This is the 3rd of 6 gravity assist flybys at #Mercury. The flybys, together with more than 15,000 hours-worth of solar electric propulsion, are needed to help the spacecraft fight against the enormous gravitational pull of the Sun, so that it can eventually lose enough energy to be captured into Mercury’s orbit in 2025."
The #ESA/ #JAXA #BepiColombo spacecraft Took this shot before its 3rd (out of 6) close pass of #Mercury
taken by BepiColombo's monitoring camera M-CAM 1 at 10:32 UTC today from a distance of 121,000 km.
The structure on the right is the solar array of the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM).
The bright stripe spanning the width of the image and passing across Mercury is an imaging artefact.
The #ESA/ #JAXA #BepiColombo spacecraft successfully made its 3rd of 6 flyby of #Mercury
next date September 5th 2024!
Use red-green/blue glasses to best enjoy this anaglyph of Mercury's terrain
video of #BepiColombo 's #Mercury flyby # 3 on June 19.
The 1st part of the movie is composed of 217 images taken by M-CAM3.
the first image from last night's #Mercury flyby by #BepiColombo, #ESA & #JAXA's mission to our innermost planet.
The south pole is near the top of the image, right at the terminator between night & day, where there a some craters that never see sunlight & may even hold ice.
Teams from across #ESA and industry have worked hard to overcome a glitch that prevented #BepiColombo
's thrusters from operating at full power. The mission is still on track, with a new trajectory that will take it just 165 km from Mercury’s surface on Wednesday
This 4th (of 6) #Mercury flyby takes BepiColombo closer to the planet than it’s ever been before Closest approach at 4 Sep, 23:48 CEST
#Space
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/Fourth_Mercury_flyby_begins_BepiColombo_s_new_trajectory