BepiColombo's last views of Earth
Date: 30 March 2020
Satellite: BepiColombo
Copyright: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM – CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Earth and the Moon as seen by one of the selfie cameras on board of the European-Japanese Mercury-explorer BepiColombo in early March 2020. The camera (M-CAM 3) took the images from a distance of around 14 million km, during the spacecraft's approach towards its mother planet ahead of the gravity assist flyby manoeuvre scheduled on 10 April. During the flyby, BepiColombo will come as close as 12 700 km from Earth's surface, which is closer than the orbital altitude of the European navigational satellites Galileo. The cameras will keep taking images throughout the manoeuvre, which will adjust BepiColombo's trajectory and send it deeper inside the Solar System.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO License. 
