# Meeting Mercury ESA459665

A beautiful sequence of 53 images taken by the monitoring cameras on board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission as the spacecraft made its first close flyby of its destination planet Mercury on 1 October 2021. The compilation includes images from two of the three Monitoring Cameras (MCAM) onboard the Mercury Transfer Module, which provides black-and-white snapshots at 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution. It is not possible to image with the high-resolution camera suite during the cruise phase. The MCAMs also capture parts of the spacecraft: MCAM-2 sees the medium-gain antenna and magnetometer boom, while the high-gain antenna is in the MCAM-3 field-of-view. The sequence opens with the closest images acquired by MCAM-2 and MCAM-3, taken at a distance of around 1000 km from the surface of the planet. Closest approach at 199 km took place about five minutes earlier, at 23:34:41 UTC. During the half hour following the close approach, imaging alternated between the two cameras. In general, MCAM-2 pointed towards the northern hemisphere of Mercury, while MCAM-3 pointed towards the southern hemisphere. Thus the subsequent images show a set of complementary views from each camera in turn, ranging from a distance of about 2420 km to 6140 km from the surface of Mercury. In these relatively close images, it is possible to identify prominent impact craters, scarps, and other geological features that BepiColombo will study in more detail once in orbit around the planet at the end of 2025. The…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2021
- Runtime: 1 min
- By: European Space Agency
- Genres: Space
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meeting_Mercury_ESA459665.webm)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-SA 3.0 igo](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/igo/deed.en) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: European Space Agency
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/158943344?play=1)