Europe's BepiColombo Mercury Mission: Fourth Flyby Timelapse | ESA

Europe's BepiColombo Mercury Mission: Fourth Flyby Timelapse | ESA

   

Watch the closest flyby of a planet ever, as the European Space Agency/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) BepiColombo spacecraft sped past Mercury during its latest encounter on September 4, 2024. This is the first European mission to Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner Solar System. Mercury is the first planet from the Sun.

This flyby marked BepiColombo’s closest approach to Mercury yet, and for the first time, the spacecraft had a clear view of Mercury’s south pole.

This timelapse is made up of 128 different black & white images captured by all three of BepiColombo’s monitoring cameras, M-CAM 1, 2 and 3. We see the planet move in and out of the fields of view of M-CAM 2 and 3, before M-CAM 1 sees the planet receding into the distance at the end of the video.

The first few images are taken in the days and weeks before the flyby. Mercury first appears in an image taken at 23:50 CEST (21:50 UTC) on September 4, at a distance of 191 km. Closest approach was at 23:48 CEST at a distance of 165 km.

The sequence ends around 24 hours later, on September 5, 2024, when BepiColombo was about 243,000 km from Mercury.

During the flyby it was possible to identify geological features that BepiColombo will study in more detail once in orbit around the planet. Four minutes after closest approach, a large ‘peak ring basin’ called Vivaldi came into view.

This crater was named after the famous Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). The flyover of Vivaldi crater was the inspiration for using Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ as the soundtrack for this timelapse.

Peak ring basins are mysterious craters created by powerful asteroid or comet impacts, so-called because of the inner ring of peaks on an otherwise flattish floor.

A couple of minutes later, another peak ring basin came into view: newly named Stoddart. The name was recently assigned following a request from the M-CAM team. They realized that this crater would be visible in these images and decided it would be worth naming considering its potential interest for scientists in the future.

BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras provided 1024 x 1024 pixel snapshots. Their main purpose is to monitor the spacecraft’s booms and antennas. This is why we see parts of the spacecraft in the foreground. The photos that they capture of Mercury during flybys are a bonus.

The September 4 gravity assist flyby was the fourth at Mercury and the seventh of nine planetary flybys overall. During its eight-year cruise to the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System, BepiColombo makes one flyby at Earth, two at Venus and six at Mercury, to help steer itself on course for entering orbit around Mercury in 2026.

Processing notes: The BepiColombo monitoring cameras provide 1024 x 1024 pixel images. These raw images have been lightly processed. The M-CAM 1 images have been cropped to 995 x 995 pixels.

Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

Acknowledgements: Image processing and video production by Mark McCaughrean

Duration: 1 minute, 30 seconds

Release Date: Sept. 13, 2024

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