BepiColombo enters orbit around Mercury after seven-year journey

After seven years of interplanetary navigation, the joint probe of the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency arrives at its decisive moment: in November 2026 the manoeuvres are scheduled that will bring the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter into stable orbit around Mercury, according to what was announced by the European Space Agency.

Italy is responsible for 4 of the 11 scientific experiments on board the mission, a contribution that confirms the role of national research in one of the most complex projects in European planetary exploration, as also reported by Global Science citing ASI and ESA sources.

ESA describes orbit insertion as the crucial step for the scientific success of the entire project, calling BepiColombo the second mission ever carried out to orbit Mercury and the most technically complex. Only upon completion of this sequence of manoeuvres will the instruments on board be able to begin collecting the data they were designed for.

The seven-year journey was marked by a series of planetary flybys, used to progressively modify the probe’s speed and trajectory until it became compatible with gravitational capture by Mercury, a planet notoriously difficult to reach due to its proximity to the Sun and the intense solar attraction that complicates approach.

The Italian contribution, concentrated on four of the eleven scientific instruments overall, concerns instrumentation for studying the planet’s surface composition and magnetic field. With the completion of the November manoeuvres, the mission’s operational phase begins, the phase in which the data collected will start being analysed by the scientific teams involved in the coming months.