BepiColumbo Makes its Third Flyby of Mercury, Seeing the Planet's Night Side By Nancy_A
In the video, the planet’s illuminated side appears in the spacecraft’s field of view, with several geological features visible on the surface. The planet’s terminator – the divide between day and night – becomes more distinctive from afar, adding to the beauty of the image sequence. At one point Mercury momentarily appears to hang between the spacecraft’s body and antenna – as if they are giving the planet a hug — before the spacecraft speeds away.
In the last part of the video, a geographically rich area covered by the flyover sequence was reconstructed as in 3D. Visible is the 600 km-long Beagle Rupes curved escarpment and the elongated Sveinsdóttir impact crater that it cuts through. It also features the 218 km-wide Manley Crater and the straight Challenger Rupes scarp. The team said that regions like these will be important for BepiColombo’s main science mission, to learn more about Mercury’s geological history.
Below is a 3D image, and you can use red-green/blue glasses to best enjoy this view. The image was taken from a distance of about 2,982 km , 17 minutes after closest approach, and covers an area roughly 1325.5 km x 642 km .
BepiColombo appears to ‘hug’ Mercury in this image taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on June 19, 2023. Credit: ESA/BepiColumbo/MTM.“We are already working intensively on preparing for this long thruster arc, increasing communications and commanding opportunities between the spacecraft and ground stations, to ensure a fast turnaround between thruster outages during each sequence,” said Santa Martinez Sanmartin, ESA’s BepiColombo mission manager.
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