BepiColombo Science Investigations During Cruise and Flybys at the Earth, Venus and Mercury

Abstract

The dual spacecraft mission BepiColombo is the first joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to explore the planet Mercury. BepiColombo was launched from Kourou (French Guiana) on October 20th, 2018, in its packed configuration including two spacecraft, a transfer module, and a sunshield. BepiColombo cruise trajectory is a long journey into the inner heliosphere, and it includes one flyby of the Earth (in April 2020), two of Venus (in October 2020 and August 2021), and six of Mercury (starting from 2021), before orbit insertion in December 2025. A big part of the mission instruments will be fully operational during the mission cruise phase, allowing unprecedented investigation of the different environments that will encounter during the 7-years long cruise. The present paper reviews all the planetary flybys and some interesting cruise configurations. Additional scientific research that will emerge in the coming years is also discussed, including the instruments that can contribute.

Reflectivity of Venus’s Dayside Disk During the 2020 Observation Campaign: Outcomes and Future Perspectives

“…The onboard UV camera (UltraViolet Imager: UVI) has monitored Venus since the orbit insertion in 2015 December (Nakamura et al 2016). ESA-JAXA's BepiColombo conducted faraway Venus observations from a distance of 0.3 au in the period 2020 August 28-September 2, when Venus was within the field of view (FOV) of the onboard UV spectrometer (PHEBUS; Mangano et al 2021). While these two spacecraft were operating, groundbased telescopes were in a good position to observe Venus for more than an hour right before sunrise.…”

Dayside magnetopause reconnection and flux transfer events under radial interplanetary magnetic field (IMF): BepiColombo Earth-flyby observations

“…These spacecraft together aim to carry out detailed investigations of Mercury's interior, surface, exosphere, and magnetosphere (Milillo et al, 2020;Murakami et al, 2020;Benkhoff et al, 2010). The mission made its first planetary flyby maneuver at Earth on 10 April 2020 (Mangano et al, 2021), during which several instruments collected measurements. The MPO and the MMO were attached during the Earth flyby, and therefore their measurements could be deemed one observation point.…”

BepiColombo’s Cruise Phase: Unique Opportunity for Synergistic Observations

“…In fact, some of the instruments on-board MPO will be continuously operating during cruise, except for the Electric Propulsion (EP) periods, such as the BepiColombo Radiation Monitor (BERM), the Magnetometer (MPO-MAG, Glassmeier et al, 2010;Heyner et al, 2021), the Mercury Gamma-ray and Neutron Spectrometer (MGNS, Mitrofanov et al, 2010), the Italian Spring Accelerometer (ISA, Iafolla et al, 2021) and MORE. In table 1, we summarize all the operational instruments during the cruise phase, excluding the planetary flybys periods [more details regarding the planetary flybys periods and the pointing of the different instruments can be found in Mangano et al (2021)]. A detailed description about the combined in situ and remote sensing instruments on-board Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe can be found in Velli et al (2020) and Müller et al (2020).…”

“…The joint measurements with BepiColombo, Solar Orbiter, and Parker Solar Probe including other operational spacecraft in the interplanetary space, will allow a better understanding of the evolution of the solar wind plasma and its large scale three-dimensional distribution under different conditions of the solar activity using both remote sening and in-situ meaurements. An extensive discussion on the science investigations during the cruise phase of BepiColombo can be found in Mangano et al (2021). Briefly, the main science topics can be grouped into seven cases: 1) Solar wind turbulence properties (e.g., Tu and Marsch, 1995;Bruno and Carbone, 2013;Sahraoui et al, 2020).…”

“…During the cruise phase, the BepiColombo spacecraft is in a so-called "stacked" configuration: the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO/Mio) is inside the Sunshield and Interface Structure (MOSIF) which is attached to the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO). MPO, MOSIF, and Mio are all connected to the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) (Mangano et al, 2021). Therefore, unlike some MPO instruments that are fully operational during cruise, all the instruments onboard Mio are shielded by MOSIF and not all of them can be scientifically operational (i.e., limited field of view, undeployed instruments).…”