Simulation of BepiColombo's sixth flyby Mercury views

During its sixth flyby of Mercury, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission will fly directly over the planet's north pole. While doing so, the spacecraft will snap photos of the cratered surface below, providing the most up-to-date views of Mercury's ‘top half’ since NASA's Messenger finished its mission in 2015.  

This simulation shows the surface of Mercury passing below the spacecraft as it will be viewed by one of its monitoring cameras, M-CAM 1. BepiColombo will approach the planet from its night side, so the surface to the right of the ‘terminator’ which divides night and day on the planet – the blue line visible from around 25 seconds into the video – will be shrouded in darkness. 

This flyby will provide the first close views in ten years of mysterious north pole craters whose insides are cast in permanent shadow. Excitingly, these craters are thought to contain water ice. M-CAM 1 will take some extra-long exposure images in the hopes of revealing more of what's inside, dimly lit by sunlight reflected from the craters' walls.  

The ‘enhanced colour’ planetary surface shown in this simulation is a fake-colour composite map which highlights differences in surface composition, based on Messenger observations (Denevi et al., 2018). While a complete greyscale map is available, the lack of complete multi-colour data from around the planet's north pole means that this surface model has a gap of coverage in that region. 

The simulated video was prepared by Emanuele Simioni with SOIM, short for Simulator for Operation of Imaging Missions. This software uses the most up-to-date mission data to calculate the exact position of Mercury, the spacecraft and the instrument geometry, determining what each of its cameras will see.  

In late 2026, the ‘stacked’ BepiColombo spacecraft will arrive at Mercury and release both ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) into polar orbits around the planet. This means that both orbiters will have full coverage of the planet's poles with their various instruments. MPO's cameras and spectrometers will improve upon Messenger's maps, providing global surface coverage in higher resolution and expanding to more wavelengths of light.