Overview of the eight‑year cruise
Since launch on 20 October 2018, BepiColombo has travelled roughly 9.9 billion kilometres and completed nine planetary flybys – one past Earth, two past Venus and six past Mercury. These swing‑bys have adjusted the trajectory for arrival at the innermost planet.
Composition of the spacecraft stack
The mission comprises ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) and the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) that carried the two orbiters to Mercury. The MTM hosts three monitoring cameras (M‑CAM) that were designed to keep an eye on the spacecraft itself.
Flybys and imminent orbit insertion
In the video the foreground shows one of the MTM’s solar arrays (M‑CAM 1 left), the MPO’s medium‑gain antenna and magnetometer boom (M‑CAM 2 centre) and the MPO’s high‑gain antenna (M‑CAM 3 right). The images have been positioned to approximate the respective fields of view of the three cameras. Because the M‑CAMs lack a shutter, many original frames contain streaks; these have been largely removed for the final clip.
Fate of the transfer module after separation
On 3 September 2026 the MTM separated from the stacked spacecraft. The two orbiters are scheduled to enter Mercury orbit in November and to split from each other on 9–10 December 2026. Thereafter the MTM, lacking its own computer and antenna, will remain in an independent heliocentric orbit, passing Mercury at about 130 000 km in late October before drifting into interplanetary space.