BepiColombo Mercury Orbital Insertion

BepiColombo, the joint ESA-JAXA mission, will achieve Mercury orbital insertion on November 21, 2026—11 months later than planned due to a thruster anomaly in September 2024, but with no impact on science goals. Launched in October 2018, it has spent 7.5 years navigating the inner Solar System via nine flybys to shed velocity. Its unique three-module configuration includes the Mercury Transfer Module, ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) for surface and exosphere science, and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) for magnetic field studies. At arrival, the MTM jettisons, and MPO and Mio separate into independent elliptical orbits, working in concert—a feat unmatched by NASA's MESSENGER mission (2011–2015), which operated a single orbiter. MESSENGER revealed unexpected volatiles and a strong magnetic field, but BepiColombo's advanced instrument suite—including MERTIS and MIXS spectrometers—will probe these mysteries in greater detail, testing planetary formation models in the inner Solar System with higher precision.