A spacecraft bound for Mercury swung by Venus on October 15, using Earth’s neighbour to adjust its course on the way to the solar system’s smallest and innermost planet.

The European-Japanese probe BepiColombo took a black-and-white snapshot of Venus from a distance of 17,000 kilometers, with some of its own instruments in the frame.

The flyby is the second of nine so-called planetary gravity assists that the spacecraft needs for its seven-year trip to Mercury. The first, around Earth, took place in April.

Flybys utilise the gravitational pull of the planets to help alter the speed and direction of the spacecraft, and together with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, help BepiColombo steer into Mercury orbit against the strong gravitational pull of the Sun.

Key points on BepiColombo Mission:

• BepiColombo is an international mission consisting of two spacecraft riding together to Mercury to orbit and to study the planet from unique vantage points. The European Space Agency (ESA) provided one orbiter. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) supplied the second orbiter.

• It will study the planet’s composition, geophysics, atmosphere, magnetosphere and history. 

• ESA built the main spacecraft, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), and JAXA supplied the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio).

• MPO will study the surface and internal composition of the planet, and Mio will study Mercury’s magnetosphere — the region of space around the planet that is dominated by its magnetic field.

• Launched on October 20, 2018, it is on a seven-year journey to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our solar system.

• After reaching Mercury in late 2025, the spacecraft will separate and the two orbiters will manoeuvre to their dedicated polar orbits around the planet. Starting science operations in early 2026, both orbiters will gather data during a one-year nominal mission, with a possible one-year extension.

• BepiColombo is named after Professor Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo (1920-1984) from the University of Padua, Italy, a mathematician and engineer. He was the first to determine that an unsuspected resonance is responsible for Mercury’s habit of rotating on its axis three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun.

• It is only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury. NASA’s Mariner 10 flew past Mercury three times in 1974-1975 and returned data including the first close-up images of the planet.

• NASA’s MESSENGER was launched in 2004 and it orbited Mercury for more than four years from 2011. The mission determined Mercury’s surface composition, revealed its geological history, discovered details about its internal magnetic field, and verified its polar deposits are dominantly water-ice. The mission ended on April 30, 2015 when MESSENGER ran out of fuel and slammed into Mercury’s surface.

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