BepiColombo will make its first flybys on Mercury
News! Very good news! The ESA / JAXA BepiColombo mission is very close to being the first of six flybys on the planet Marecur. He will do this somewhere on October 1, but this date may be a little delayed. BepiColombo will make its first flybys on October 1, 2021, at 23:34 UTC. This mission takes place at approx. 1 month after the meeting with Venus, in August, you can see the video surprised by Bepi and the images from Venus, as well as other information here: https://www.bailey-universe.com/l/en-more-photo-and-information-jaxa-esa-collaboration/
Bepi will reach Mercury at 200 km (approx. 125 miles) altitude from Mercury, gathering scientific data from the planet, but it will also make some images, from the fact that it is at a fairly high altitude of Mercury. According to ESA, the images will be difficult to make, because BepiColombo arrives near Mercury in the evening, so the images will not be the best. He announced that the closest image will be at approx. 1000 km. distance. Bepi arrived here with the help of an ESA ship / probe that stood for the first few moments in front of him, so that Bepi would not fry his camera in front of the film, in the sunlight. But, we will receive most of the data only in 2025, when Bepi will study until then most of the things in his mission. But still, even if Bepi was helped to reach the planet Mercury, still to reach orbit, he will have to use a flybys near Earth, two from Venus and six from Mercury, along with solar propulsion systems. , to finally reach Mercury's orbit.
ESA has so far announced that Bepi will be widely used by solar propulsion systems. This will help it reach a minimum altitude of 198 km from Mercury. "Because of our remarkable ground stations, we know where our spacecraft is with such precision. With this information, ESOC's Flight Dynamics team knows how much we need to maneuver to be in the right place for Mercury's gravitational assistance, "said Elsa Montagnon, the spacecraft's operations manager for the mission. Elsa supports this, because Mercury is 100 million km away. away from Earth, but it is known that there are high-performance systems for measuring the exact Earth-Bepi distance, as well as its exact location.
We would like to inform you that due to the fact that Bepi is far from the Earth, the images do not arrive immediately, they take a while. So the first image might not be valid, only at 08:00 CEST on Saturday morning, this week. The image resolution will be approx. 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution. And the images will be made by the MCAM camera system. ESA still hopes that it would like Bepi to take images close to Mercury, because it will then be able to see (ESA and JAXA) see craters, formed a long time ago and maybe even their size, approx. .
The latest statements read: "We're really looking forward to seeing the first results from measurements taken so close to Mercury's surface,"
said Johannes Benkhoff, ESA's BepiColombo project scientist. "When I started working as project scientist on BepiColombo in January 2008, NASA's Messenger mission had its first flyby at Mercury. Now it's our turn. It's a fantastic feeling!", post ESA.
We wish success to ESA and JAXA, as well as to the ships and probes participating in this mission.
Article by: Andacs Robert Eugen
If there is more news on Mercury or this mission, as well as if the first images appear on Mercury from this mission or other news from space, we will let you know. but don't forget to subscribe to be announced here: