This animation shows the fly-by maneuver that the European Space Agency and JAXA spacecraft BepiColombo will perform on April 10th. BepiColombo will pass at around 19000 km from Earth at its closer approach, closer to the surface than the Galileo and GPS satellites. This maneuver will use Earth’s gravity to slow down the spacecraft on its trip to Mercury, the final destination of BepiColombo. During the fly-by, some of the instruments onboard the spacecraft will take observations for testing its performance before arriving to Mercury. The field-of-view of Mertis and Phebus, mounted in the MPO module, will observe the Moon, while the monitoring cameras (MCAM) of the Mercury Transfer Module will observe the Earth before and after the closest approach.
This animation in high-definition is provided as a 360 degrees video adept for cardboard-like Virtual Reality headsets. It has been generated using the SPICE library and Data. SPICE is a software developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the data is generated at the European Space and Astronomy Center (ESAC) in Spain by the ESA SPICE Service provided by RHEA Group.
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ESA SPICE Service Twitter: @SpiceEsa
