MTM's selfie footage of BepiColombo's eight-year journey

The European Space Agency and JAXA have published a selfie-style video documenting BepiColombo’s eight-year voyage through the inner Solar System, capturing its progress toward Mercury’s orbit. The spacecraft has traveled 9.9 billion kilometers and completed nine planetary flybys, including one of Earth, two of Venus, and six of Mercury. The footage, compiled from monitoring cameras on the Mercury Transfer Module, marks the first time the mission’s journey has been presented as a continuous video sequence.

The video showcases the spacecraft’s composite structure, featuring ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter, JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, and the Mercury Transfer Module that carried them. The three monitoring cameras, positioned to reflect their relative fields of view, captured images of the spacecraft’s solar arrays, antennas, and booms. Original images contained streaks due to light exposure during read-out, which have been digitally removed for clarity in the final video.

BepiColombo’s arrival phase at Mercury began on 3 September 2026, when the Mercury Transfer Module separated from the spacecraft stack. The two orbiters are scheduled to enter Mercury’s orbit in November 2026, followed by their separation on 9–10 December 2026. This will make BepiColombo the first mission to operate two spacecraft in orbit around Mercury simultaneously.

The Mercury Transfer Module, which lacks a computer and Earth-communication antenna, will continue orbiting the Sun indefinitely after separation. It is expected to pass within approximately 130,000 kilometers of Mercury in late October 2026 before drifting into interplanetary space, never approaching the planet again. The two science orbiters will then begin their primary mission to study Mercury’s surface, magnetosphere, and environment.