MTM's selfie footage of BepiColombo's eight-year journey

Video: 00:04:20 Witness how over the last eight years, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has been travelling through the inner Solar System and aligning itself with Mercury's orbit. So far, it has travelled 9.9 billion km and completed nine 'planetary flybys' to help steer its way. In the video, you can see the spacecraft fly past Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury six times. Since launching on 20 October 2018, BepiColombo has been travelling as a composite spacecraft made up of 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. We've shared photos and videos before, taken by the spacecraft's three monitoring cameras (M-CAMs) on MTM. But this is the first time we've compiled them into a video of the mission's complete journey so far. The monitoring cameras were designed to keep an eye on the spacecraft itself. In the foreground, you can see one of MTM's solar arrays (M-CAM 1, left), MPO's medium-gain antenna and magnetometer boom (M-CAM 2, middle), and MPO's high-gain antenna (M-CAM 3, right). The images have been positioned and oriented to approximately reflect the re…

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