MTM's selfie footage of BepiColombo's eight-year journey
The 00:04:20 video shows how the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has spent the last eight years travelling through the inner Solar System and aligning itself with Mercury's orbit. So far it has travelled 9.9 billion km and completed nine planetary flybys, with the footage showing flybys of Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury six times. Since launching on 20 October 2018, BepiColombo has been travelling as a composite spacecraft made up of ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio), and the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) that carried the two orbiters to Mercury. Photos and videos from the spacecraft's three monitoring cameras (M-CAMs) on MTM have been shared before, but this is the first time they have been compiled into a video of the mission's complete journey so far.
The M-CAMs were designed to keep an eye on the spacecraft itself. In the foreground, the video shows one of MTM's solar arrays (M-CAM 1, left), MPO's medium-gain antenna and magnetometer boom (M-CAM 2, middle), and MPO's high-gain antenna (M-CAM 3, right). The images have been positioned and oriented to approximately reflect the relative fields of view of the three M-CAMs. Because the M-CAMs have no shutter, many original images contain streaks from light falling on the detectors during image read-out; these streaks have largely been removed for this video.
BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury began on 3 September 2026, with MTM separating from the spacecraft stack. The two stacked orbiters will enter orbit around Mercury in November, and separate from each other on 9–10 December 2026. From that moment on, BepiColombo will be the first mission with two spacecraft orbiting planet Mercury at the same time.
MTM has no computer to control itself and lacks an antenna to communicate with Earth. Now that it has separated from the rest, it will circle the Sun indefinitely, letting the two science modules get to work. It is expected to pass by Mercury at a distance of around 130,000 km in late October, after which it will enter interplanetary space and not get any closer to Mercury. The item also links to more information about BepiColombo and to the raw M-CAM images.