At 06:59 central time On January 8, European time, the BepiColombo spacecraft successfully performed its sixth flyby of Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system. It was a “gravitational assist maneuver,” a move that used Mercury’s gravitational pull to alter the course of the BepiColombo vehicle, which will put it into orbit around the planet at the end of 2026.
BepiColombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that will study the composition of Mercury. The vehicle, which consists of two probes, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, was launched in the fall of 2018 and had previously been orbiting the sun.
When it approaches Mercury again, the vehicle will separate and the two probes will head to their dedicated polar orbits. Scientific work on BepiColombo is scheduled for early 2027, when the probes will seek information about how the planet formed and whether some of its craters contain water in the form of ice.
Until then, we will have to settle for the details contained in these three images taken by the vehicle during its last flyby.