BepiColombo Took Some Incredible Pictures As It Swung By Earth On Its Way To Mercury

[Judi Lynn]

Alfredo Carpineti
By Alfredo Carpineti
10 APR 2020, 13:17

The European-Japanese collaborative mission BepiColombo has completed its scheduled flyby of Earth on its way to its target planet, Mercury. The flyby, which took place on April 10, was a necessary maneuver to use Earth's gravity to sling the spacecraft towards the center of the Solar System.

You might think this would be counterintuitive; shouldn’t it be easy to just go towards the Sun? The answer is no: Anything launched from Earth starts from the same speed that keeps our planet from falling into the Sun. To move inward in the Solar System, spacecraft have to be slowed down, and scientists worked out this can be done with carefully planned flybys of planets. So the mission used Earth as a celestial brake, using our planet's gravitational pull to slow down and bend its trajectory towards the inner portions of the Solar System. Luckily it was successful, as this was just the first of BepiColombo's nine flybys to get to Mercury.

It took some beautiful images of our planet as it made its closest approach, coming less than 12,700 kilometers (7,890 miles) from Earth’s surface at 04:25am UTC, before bidding farewell to Earth.

The maneuver did not require any intervention from the team monitoring it from Earth, though they had to keep a close eye on it as the spacecraft crossed Earth's shadow for 34 nerve-wracking minutes, where it stopped receiving energy from the Sun.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/space/bepicolombo-took-some-incredible-pictures-as-it-swung-by-earth-on-its-way-to-mercury/

[Wounded Bear]

1. Cool stuff! Thanks for the link...nt