“ESA showed new photos of Mercury from a distance of 300 km from the surface of the planet BepiColombo mission took a series of new pictures of Mercury during the sixth flyby of the planet. The spacecraft, launched in 2018, is scheduled to land on Mercury in 2026 for a detailed study.”, — write on: unn.ua
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The series of photos was taken thanks to the sixth flyby of the spacecraft over the smallest planet in the Solar System at an altitude of less than 300 km above the surface of Mercury.
In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will be working hard to unlock as many of Mercury’s mysteries as possible with the data from this flyby, it said.
The main phase of the BepiColombo mission may not begin until two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-studied planet
BepiColombo was launched in 2018 and is scheduled to land on the surface of Mercury in late 2026. The spacecraft will then split into two orbiters that will travel around the planet for the next year to collect data.
We will remind
NASA plans to launch autonomous robots the size of a palm to explore the oceans beneath the ice of Europa and Enceladus. The robots will search for signs of life in the internal oceans of satellites with the help of a special cryobot.