BepiColombo and the Gaia mission, which maps our galaxy, the Milky Way, in three dimensions, were approved in 2000. ESA then issued a request for proposal for the BepiColombo MPO payload in 2004.

BepiColombo MPO at Mercury. Spacecraft ESA/Mercury NASA/Author provided. But why Mercury? It is a puzzling planet. NASA's MESSENGER orbiter (2011-2015) revealed many reasons why scientists are ...

The BepiColombo Mercury Transfer Module ... (MPO).” BepiColombo has a long journey ahead of it—seven years, to be exact. The joint mission between the ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration ...

The European half of the BepiColombo mission, a spacecraft called the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), arrives in April in Kourou, French Guiana, for the mission's launch aboard an Arianespace rocket.

The BepiColombo probe, launching on October 20, aims to make sense of this mysterious world. ... MPO provides BepiColombo’s Probing of Hermean Exosphere by Ultraviolet Spectroscopy (PHEBUS) ...

BepiColombo: Mercury Stumps Scientists, but This Mission Could Finally Unravel Its Mysteries Published May 17, 2018 at 12:28 PM EDT Updated May 18, 2018 at 3:31 AM EDT ...

During a June 2023 flyby of Mercury, BepiColombo encountered several characteristics of the planet's magnetic field. This field forms a protective magnetic bubble around Mercury and guards the ...

BepiColombo, which launched in 2018, comprises two science orbiters that will circle Mercury – the European Space Agency’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s ...

Europe's BepiColombo mission has returned its first pictures of Mercury, the Solar System's innermost planet. The probe took the images shortly after it zipped over the little world at an altitude ...

Only two missions have reached Mercury before BepiColombo: NASA’s Mariner 10 flybys in the 1970s and MESSENGER, ... (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).