The BepiColombo mission to Mercury: First Results and status update

BepiColombo, a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for comprehensive exploration of planet Mercury will perform three more flybys at Mercury before jettisoning its transfer spacecraft in late 2025 and bringing the two spacecraft into its dedicated orbits around Mercury in early 2026. The upcoming flybys are time wise very close together and take place within four months starting in September 2024.
Although the two BepiColombo spacecraft are in a stacked configuration during its even yearlong cruise and therefore only some of the instruments can perform scientific observations, the mission produces already some very valuable results. As an example, Mercury’s southern inner magnetosphere, a so far unexplored region, has been observed by the BepiColombo ion and fields instruments during the pass.  Data taken during the first three Mercury's flybys revealed a magnetosphere populated by diverse populations and confirmed a really dynamic regime. BepiColombo with its state of the art and very comprehensive payload will perform measurements to increase our knowledge on the fundamental questions about Mercury’s evolution, composition, interior, magnetosphere, and exosphere. During the talk a status of the mission and results from science operations during cruise will be presented.