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BepiColombo mission to Mercury: First year of flight

Montagnon, Elsa; Ferri, Paolo; Accomazzo, Andrea +1 more

Launched in October 2018, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission is set to arrive at Mercury in late 2025. The modular S/C consists of two scientific Mercury orbiters and a cruise module with electric propulsion to support the 7-years cruise phase with planetary flybys at Earth (1x), Venus (2x) and Mercury (6x). Flight operations of the composite spacec…

General relativistic impact on the precision of BepiColombo gravity-assists

Yefremov, Alexander P.

The general relativistic (GR) impact is assessed on the precision of the announced BepiColombo (BC) space positions at the Earth, Venus and Mercury flyby points providing planned gravity-assists. Apart of the known elliptic orbit precession, another recently specified for the Schwarzschild-Kerr metric effect of the ellipse axes contraction is cons…

BELA transmitter performance and pointing stability verification campaign at DLR-PF

Michaelis, H.; Kallenbach, R.; Hussmann, H. +4 more

BELA is the first European planetary laser altimeter and shall be launched onboard of ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) as part of the BepiColombo spacecraft in October 2018. The complete development of the instrument was done in collaboration with team members in Switzerland, Germany and Spain. The transmitter is also the first space-qualifie…