But the Prestige project of the BepiColombo spacecraft is already underway in space since October 2018. The mission is being carried out jointly by ESA and the Japanese space agency JAXA. Your destination is Mercury, the innermost planet closest to the sun in our solar system.
–
A crazy trip
The crazy thing about the trip to Mercury is that the probe has to be sent around the sun first. Then she comes back to Earth and gets her momentum again – one of nine so-called swing-by maneuvers, in which you use the gravitational pull of the celestial bodies to get BepiColombo to its destination with as little fuel as possible. The probe is currently in orbit around the sun, with an approximate distance that also exists between earth and sun. On April 10, around 6.25 a.m. (CEST) in the morning, the spacecraft will approach Earth for 12,700 km and complete its first swipe.
–
It is the last time that we will see BepiColombo from Earth.
–
–
The Japanese-European project will be seen from Earth for the last time. Then it says “bye earth” and “Kon’nichiwa suisei” (Japanese for “Hello Mercury”). But during her last visit, she’ll be photographing our blue planet and the moon, explains Joe Zender, ESA’s deputy project scientist for BepiColomb: “We will see the earth approach and grow. When it is closest, we will take some pictures.” Then a whole series of pictures are taken over a period of several hours “to look at the Earth-Moon system as it gets smaller and smaller until we lose sight of it completely.”
–
The crazy journey continues
Your next flyby is scheduled for October 15 this year and the third for August 11, 2021. BepiColombo will be with our inner neighbor, Venus, during both flyby maneuvers. The spacecraft will complete the next six maneuvers on its target, Mercury, until it can finally begin its actual mission on December 5, 2025 in Mercury’s orbit: the investigation of the closest planet to the sun, the least studied rock planet in our solar system.
–
– .
:quality(80)/cdn-kiosk-api.telegraaf.nl/406bdc98-78a2-11ea-afef-0217670beecd.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1)
