The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission completed its first flyby on 10 April,
as the spacecraft came less than 12 700 km from Earth’s surface at 06:25
CEST, steering its trajectory towards the final destination, Mercury. Images
gathered just before closest approach portray our planet shining through
darkness, during one of humankind’s most challenging times in recent history.
Launched in
2018, BepiColombo is on a seven-year journey to the smallest and innermost
planet orbiting the Sun, which holds important clues about the formation and
evolution of the entire Solar System.
Today’s
operation is the first of nine flybys which, together with the onboard solar
propulsion system, will help the spacecraft reach its target orbit around
Mercury. The next two flybys will take place at Venus and further six at
Mercury itself.
While the
manoeuvre took advantage of Earth’s gravity to adjust the path of the
spacecraft and did not require any active operations, such as firing thrusters,
it included 34 critical minutes shortly after BepiColombo’s closest approach to
our planet, when the spacecraft flew across the shadow of Earth.
“This eclipse
phase was the most delicate part of the flyby, with the spacecraft passing
through the shadow of our planet and not receiving any direct sunlight for the
first time after launch,” said Elsa Montagnon, BepiColombo Spacecraft
Operations Manager for ESA.
To prepare for
the scheduled eclipse, mission operators fully charged the spacecraft batteries
and warmed up all components in advance, then closely monitored the temperature
of all onboard systems during the period in darkness, between 07:01 and 07:35
CEST.
“It is always
nerve-wracking to know a spacecraft’s solar panels are not bathed in sunlight.
When we saw the solar cells had restarted to generate electrical current, we
knew BepiColombo was finally out of Earth’s shadow and ready to proceed on its
interplanetary journey,” added Elsa.
Space operations
are never routine at ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, but
today’s flyby had one extra challenge. The manoeuvre, programmed long in
advance and impossible to postpone, had to be prepared with limited on-site
personnel, amid the social distancing measures adopted by the Agency in
response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic; but the restrictions had no
impact on the operation’s success.
As BepiColombo
swung by our planet, most scientific instruments on ESA’s Mercury Planetary
Orbiter – one of the two science spacecraft that make up the mission – were
switched on. Several sensors were also active on the second component of the
mission, JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, also known as Mio.
“Today was of
course very different to what we could have imagined only a couple of months
ago,” said Johannes Benkhoff, ESA’s BepiColombo Project Scientist, who followed
the operation from his home in the Netherlands, along with the many scientists
from the 16 instrument teams that comprise the mission, scattered between
Europe and Japan.
“We are all
pleased that the flyby went well and that we could operate several scientific
instruments, and we are looking forward to receiving and analysing the data.
These will also be useful to prepare for the next flyby, when BepiColombo will
swing past Venus in October.”
“There is a
great interest in Japan in the BepiColombo mission. Thus, after the successful
flyby we are looking forward to the science at Venus and Mercury,” said Go
Murakami, BepiColombo Project Scientist at JAXA.
Source: https://myfusimotors.com/2020/04/12/bepicolombo-takes-last-snaps-of-earth-en-route-to-mercury/
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