🚀 🇪🇺 🇯🇵 BepiColombo is in its final approach to Mercury!
The mission is named after 🇮🇹 👾 venetian Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo (1920–1984), a mathematician, engineer, and professor from Padua whose calculations made NASA's first close-up exploration of Mercury possible.
The 🇪🇺 ESA - 🇯🇵 JAXA mission successfully separated from its Mercury Transfer Module after nearly eight years and billions of kilometres through the inner Solar System.
The two science orbiters are now coasting toward Mercury (the Sun’s closest planet).
✍️ Next key milestones:
- November 2026: Mercury orbit insertion - December 2026: The two orbiters separate - April 2027: Full science operations begin
The spacecraft:
🇪🇺 ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO): Maps the surface, studies the interior, composition, and tests aspects of general relativity
🇯🇵 JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio): Investigates Mercury’s magnetic field, magnetosphere, and interaction with the solar wind
Major european contributing countries that made this possible:
🇩🇪 Germany (Airbus) 🇮🇹 Italy (Thales Alenia + ASI) 🇫🇷 France (Airbus) 🇬🇧 United Kingdom (Airbus)
Plus strong industrial and scientific involvement from many other ESA member states.
✍️ Mercury is the least-explored rocky planet in the Solar System:
- a surprisingly large iron core, - polar ice in permanent shadow, - strange surface hollows, - a magnetic field that shouldn’t exist on such a small, slow-rotating world.
Getting there is extremely hard. BepiColombo traveled for 8 years, used nine planetary flybys (Earth, Venus ×2, Mercury ×6) plus solar-electric propulsion.
Long live 🇪🇺 Europe ❤️