Since launching on 20 October 2018, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has been travelling through the inner Solar System 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. MTM is outfitted with three monitoring cameras (M-CAMs), which were designed to keep an eye on the spacecraft itself. During BepiColombo's cruise phase, the M-CAMs captured daily snapshots of the spacecraft's journey.
This image is a composition of the final snapshots taken by the three M-CAMs during the separation of the MTM from the two orbiters on September 03, 2026. On the left, you can see one of MTM's solar arrays (captured by M-CAM 1), in the middle, MPO's medium-gain antenna and magnetometer boom are visible (captured by M-CAM 2), and on the right you can see MPO's high-gain antenna (captured by M-CAM 3). The images have been positioned and oriented to approximately reflect the relative fields of view of the three M-CAMs. As these cameras have no shutter, many images contain streaks due to light falling on the detectors during image read-out, as is the case on the left-hand side of the composition.
MTM has no computer to control itself, and lacks an antenna to communicate with Earth, which means this was the last impression MTM's cameras captured of itself and its cargo. ESA compiled the images into a video showing the mission's complete journey so far, which can be found here.
This image was composed from the raw M-CAM footage to match the composition shown in the ESA video by Alexander Schneeberger, member of the communications and outreach team at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH). The University of Bern contributes to BepiColombo with the laser altimeter BELA and the mass spectrometer STROFIO.
