The BepiColombo Probe Just Took a Ridiculously Close Video of Venus as It Flew By - ScienceAlert

Two years after it left Earth, Mercury probe BepiColombo has completed the first of its first flybys of Venus.

As it swung around the planet on a curved trajectory, BepiColombo gave its instruments a workout, testing their functionality for a taste of what the spacecraft will do in Mercury orbit and collecting some data on Venus – recently in the news for the discovery of phosphine gas in its atmosphere.

"This sequence of 64 images was captured by Monitoring Camera 2 onboard the Mercury Transfer Module from 40 minutes before until 15 minutes after closest approach of 10,720 kilometres (6,661 miles) from Venus," wrote the ESA in a blog post.

The third will also be Venus, in August 2021; the remaining six gravity assist flybys will be of Mercury itself, further slowing BepiColombo down so that it can finally arrive in a stable orbit in December 2025.

Both Venus flybys will be used to test BepiColombo instruments and collect Venus data.

In this first flyby, scientists with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the University of Münster in Germany fired up the MErcury Radiometer and Thermal Infrared Spectrometer (MERTIS) instrument to take almost 100,000 images as BepiColombo approached the planet.

MERTIS was designed to collect data on the rock composition of Venus, but its infrared capabilities can also penetrate Venus' clouds to a certain depth.