ESA / JAXA’s BepiColombo has captured the spacecraft’s closet images yet of Mercury during its sixth flyby on January 8, 2025. It flew just 295 km (183 mi) above the planet and successfully completed the final gravity assist maneuver needed to steer it into orbit around the planet by late 2026.
What makes these images significant is the fact that they mark the last time that the mission’s M-CAMs get up-close views of Mercury, as the spacecraft module they are attached to will separate from the mission’s two orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. This will happen before they both enter orbit around Mercury in late 2026.
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BepiColombo’s main mission phase may only start two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet. In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries with the data from this flyby as we can,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo’s Project Scientist at ESA.
