Two years after it left Earth, the BepiColombo probe made its first flyby of Venus. This maneuver is intended to give the spacecraft an acceleration along the way, but also too good an opportunity to abandon science.
Flying around the planet in a curved trajectory, BepiColombo trained its instruments, tested their functionality, and collected some data about Venus.
The joint probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) captured a variety of images that ESA compiled into a flyby video.
“This sequence of 64 images was captured by a surveillance camera 10,720 kilometers from Venus,” ESA wrote in a blog post. 'Pictures were taken every 52 seconds.'
(ESA / BepiColombo / MTM)
The pictures had to be processed a little – Venus was so bright that the pictures turned out to be quite saturated even at the shortest shutter speed. But the shape of the terminator line, which marks the border between day and night, changes as BepiColombo moves around the planet in a curved path.
Gravitational maneuvers are a very common tool for moving spaceships around the solar system. They are also the result of very careful planning, with a pre-planned route and a direct projection of where the planets and satellites will be when the spacecraft reaches them to make the most of the space body's convergence opportunities.
Sources: Photo: (ESA / BepiColombo / MTM)
