La Jornada: Spacecraft from Europe and Japan approach Mercury

Cape Canaveral. Two Mercury-bound spacecraft left their mothership behind yesterday and faced the final leg of their nearly decade-long journey to the smallest planet in the solar system and the closest to the Sun.

The European and Japanese ships, linked together, separated from their cruiser as planned, but controllers had to wait two anxious hours for confirmation via radio signals. The crucial operation was transmitted from the European Space Agency’s control center in Germany, more than 200 million kilometers away.

“It’s a brilliant moment,” said the project’s lead scientist, Geraint Jones.

If all goes well, the docked ships known as BepiColombo They will enter orbit around Mercury in November and separate from each other in December to map and study the entire planet from different altitudes. As of yesterday, the ship still had 3.3 million kilometers to go to reach its destination.

tiny planet

“Mercury is so tiny and yet it harbors some of the greatest mysteries of our solar system,” mission director Santa Martinez said earlier in the week.

Jones added: “There is still a lot to learn.”

BepiColombo It has already traveled more than 10 billion kilometers on its indirect route, according to Martinez.

It took nine planetary flybys to reduce its energy enough to become trapped in Mercury’s orbit. The last flyby, in January 2025, returned impressive photos of Mercury’s impact craters and volcanic plains.

Starting next spring, a battery of scientific instruments on the European and Japanese spacecraft will study the magnetic field surrounding Mercury, the planet’s dense interior and geological processes on the surface, including “voids,” or depressions, that scientists believe are being eroded by minerals vaporizing from rocks.

It is a strange world of contrasts.