BepiColombo’s Third Mercury Flyby Time-lapse

BepiColombo made its Third Mercury Flyby on Monday 19th June , it has 3 more to go before it has slowed down enough to enter orbit of Mercury , the multiple flybys are needed to slow the craft due to the gravitational attraction of the Sun.

In the first part of the movie, composed of 217 images captured by BepiColombo’s monitoring camera M-CAM 3, the planet’s illuminated side quickly appears in the spacecraft’s field of view, showing off a bounty of geological features on its surface. The planet’s terminator – the divide between day and night – becomes more distinctive from afar, adding to the beauty of the image sequence. At one point Mercury momentarily appears to hang between the spacecraft’s body and antenna before the spacecraft speeds away.

The image sequence starts from 19:46:25 UTC on 19 June 2023, at an altitude of 1 789 km above the planet’s surface, and ends at 20:34:25 UTC on 20 June 2023, when BepiColombo was 331 755 km away. The image cadence was roughly once per minute around closest approach, but much slower in the later phases.

The flyover begins looking down vertically, with east towards the top of the frame. The viewpoint then swoops down and in to focus on Beagle Rupes and Sveinsdóttir Crater, then looping round so the viewpoint migrates from east to south. It then tracks south to bring Manley Crater into the centre, with the straight scarp known as Challenger Rupes to its left, before rotating the view to bring north back to the top. At the end, the animated topography fades out and the projected image used for 3D reconstruction appears. Regions like these will be important for BepiColombo’s main science mission, to learn more about Mercury’s geological history.
www.esa.int...

a reply to: gortex

Black and white image instead of full color?

The craters look shallow.

How hot are the conditions effecting the probe, I wonder?

a reply to: gortex

thank you for the post. whenever i see shots like this, i get a shiver and a strange longing to get out there. we are probably star children and the universe is more familiar to us than we think.

It's always interested me how the surface of Mercury is instantly identifiable as being different from our Moon. Mercury's gravity is more than twice that of the Moon's (3.7m/s^2 versus 1.62m/s^2). The craters are much shallower.