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A Euro-Japanese BepiColombo probe is heading towards Mercury zoomed in beyond Venus Tuesday (August 10), returning selfies and other metrics that could reveal new facts about the cloud planet’s atmosphere.
the European Space Agency (ESA), which cooperates on this mission with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), released the first flyover image of Venus, taken shortly after the closest approach to the planet by BepiColombo, Tuesday evening (August 10). During the encounter, the probe passed within 340 miles (552 kilometers) of Venus. More images are expected to follow, ESA said.
The first selfie image of Venus, taken Tuesday at 9:57 am EDT (13:57 GMT) when BepiColombo was at a distance of 977 miles (1,573 km) from the surface of Venus, was captured with one of the three “selfie cameras” aboard the spacecraft.
Related: BepiColombo spacecraft documents first year in space with selfies
The three cameras, providing black and white images with a resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels, were originally intended to monitor the deployment of BepiColombo solar panels after its launch in October 2018. But the BepiColombo team have since found creative ways to leverage it during the nine planetary flyovers the spacecraft must complete to reach its destination.
In April 2020, BepiColombo took earth images as he greeted his home planet for the last time from a distance of 7,900 miles (12,689 km). In October 2020, the spacecraft got its first glimpse of Venus when it swung across the planet at a distance of 6,650 miles (10,700 km). Tuesday’s meeting was much closer to the planet.
BepiColombo’s next planetary photo opportunity will be in less than two months (October 1), when the spacecraft – named after Italian physicist Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo – takes a first look at Mercury. BepiColombo will perform a total of six overflights over the smallest and innermost planet in the solar system, before entering its orbit scheduled for 2025. All of these overflights are designed to adjust BepiColombo’s trajectory and slow it against gravitational pull. of the sun, so that he can finally approach Mercury in the right way.
Better photo opportunities ahead
Speaking of the last flyby of Venus, Johannes Benkhoff, scientist for the BepiColombo project at ESA, told Space.com that the images of Venus were, unfortunately, overexposed due to the planet’s strong albedo, or reflectivity.
“Venus is a very bright planet and these selfie cameras were not designed to observe such bright objects at such a close distance,” said Benkhoff.
BepiColombo also carries a high-resolution stereoscopic camera, however, which cannot be used while cruising through the inner solar system.
The satellite actually consists of three spacecraft stacked on top of each other, which means that some of the instruments are hidden. The spacecraft carries two orbiters, the European Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Japanese Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, which sit atop the Mercury Transfer Module. With its 15-meter solar panels, the transfer module is responsible for bringing the two orbiters to Mercury and will be jettisoned once the trio reach their destination. It is only after the two orbiters have separated and entered their respective orbits that they will be able to make full use of all their instruments.
But even in the travel setup, some instruments picked up valuable data during the overflights. The latest flyby of Venus could provide particularly interesting information about the chemical makeup of Venus’ atmosphere as the spacecraft flew so close to the planet, Benkhoff said.
The next flyby of Mercury should produce better quality images than that of Venus, Benkhoff added, because Mercury is a darker planet.
“In Mercury, we really hope that we will see structures on the surface, which we couldn’t see in Venus because of its luminosity,” said Benkhoff.
The flight over Venus, due to its proximity to the planet, provided the first opportunity to test BepiColombo’s scientific instruments at about the same distance from a surface on which they were designed to operate.
The next flyby of Mercury will come even closer, at a distance of only 125 miles (200 km) from the surface of Mercury. October flyby will be the first time a spacecraft has visited the scorched rocky planet near the sun since the end of NASA Messenger mission in 2015.
The BepiColombo team is hoping their orbiters will help shed light on some of the mysteries of the tiny planet discovered but not fully explored by Messenger, for example, if it really has water ice in its polar craters.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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