On its long-term mission to Mercury, the BepiColombo probe flew past Venus on Thursday morning (CEST). “Everything worked, it was successful,” said Simon Plum from the ESA Satellite Control Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt of the German Press Agency. A detailed analysis would now be carried out in the coming week. Shortly before 6. 00 the European-Japanese spacecraft, which cost well over a billion euros, flew in good 10. 000 Kilometers of distance past the neighboring planet of the earth. The maneuver was controlled from the control center in Darmstadt.

Braking on the planet BepiColombo needs to fly past planets to reduce its speed. This is the only way for the spacecraft to slow down the thrust from the sun’s gravity and finally to swing into a stable orbit around Mercury at the calculated speed. On Thursday morning, the speed was reduced by almost a tenth to around 34 kilometers per second.

A similar maneuver was performed by BepiColombo last April when the probe turned down for a flyby to less than 12. 700 kilometers neared the earth. On the flight to Mercury, the smallest and fastest planet in our solar system, the probe will be at Venus again and a total of six times at Mercury at an altitude of only 550 kilometers fly by before it 2025 swings into its final orbit. After around seven years of flight time, the 2018 launched probe will have traveled around nine billion kilometers.

Venus back in focus During the flight around Venus, the probe collected data and also took pictures. Seven of the eleven instruments on board were supposed to collect science data from Venus. The planet’s neighbor recently came back into focus. In September, astronomers announced that they had discovered the gas monophosphane in the Venusian atmosphere. On earth, this occurs primarily through biological processes that take place in the absence of oxygen. But the researchers immediately cleared a