BepiColombo Starts Final Mercury Arrival, Separating Transfer Module After 9.9 Billion Km
Updated
Updated · Sky at Night Magazine · Sep 9
BepiColombo Starts Final Mercury Arrival, Separating Transfer Module After 9.9 Billion Km
3 articles · Updated · Sky at Night Magazine · Sep 9
Summary
September 3 marked BepiColombo’s final Mercury arrival sequence, when the Mercury Transfer Module separated from the mission’s two science orbiters after nearly eight years in flight.
9.9 billion km of travel and nine gravity assists—past Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury six times—slowed and positioned the spacecraft for orbital insertion around the innermost planet.
Late October will send the discarded transfer module past Mercury at about 130,000 km before it settles into permanent orbit around the Sun.
November is the target for Mercury orbit insertion by ESA’s MPO and JAXA’s Mio, which will decouple on December 9-10 to become the first two independent spacecraft to orbit Mercury simultaneously.
ESA and JAXA paired the milestone with a newly compiled voyage video, stitching together footage from the transfer module’s monitoring cameras and cleaning streak artifacts from the engineering images.