The BepiColombo mission has completed the first of two flybys of Venus needed to reach Mercury. During
The BepiColombo spacecraft launched inOctober 2018 and is due to arrive on Mercury in 2025. But to get there, he must complete a series of nine gravitational flights - around Earth, Venus and Mercury, in order to finally enter the orbit of the most distant planet in the solar system. These carefully planned maneuvers steer and propel the ship to keep it in the right direction.
Apart from correcting course, this stage of the missionBepiColombo will allow scientists to learn more about the properties of the planet's atmosphere. According to the scientific director of the BepiColombo project, Johannes Benckhoff, the quality of the collected materials exceeded the expectations of the researchers. When approaching Venus, they activated ten scientific devices. This allowed them to analyze the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
In the images that the researchers thenedited into a video, Venus at first looks like a small white disk, and then becomes much larger as the ship quickly approaches the planet. The view of the planet at some points in the video is obstructed by the extended extremities of the probe. However, the researchers hope that they will be able to take more frames during the second gravitational flight to the space object.
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