After eight years and 9.9 billion kilometers, the BepiColombo spacecraft has finally reached Mercury, and for the first time, the entire journey has been compiled into a single video. The footage, released by the European Space Agency (ESA), stitches together images from the spacecraft's three monitoring cameras, showing its path through the inner Solar System as it performed nine planetary flybys: one past Earth, two past Venus, and six past Mercury.
A Selfie Stick in Space
The video is essentially a long selfie. The monitoring cameras, called M-CAMs, were mounted on the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) not to capture scenic views, but to keep an eye on the spacecraft itself. In the foreground, viewers can see one of MTM's solar arrays, along with the antennas and magnetometer boom of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO). The images have been oriented to reflect the cameras' relative fields of view, giving a sense of the spacecraft's structure as it tumbled through space.
Because the cameras lack a shutter, many original images had light streaks from the detectors during read-out. For the video, these streaks were largely removed, resulting in a cleaner view of the journey.
The Final Separation
BepiColombo launched on 20 October 2018 as a composite spacecraft, combining ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio), and the MTM that carried them. The arrival at Mercury began on 3 September 2026, when the MTM separated from the stack. The two orbiters are now set to enter orbit around Mercury in November, and will separate from each other on 9–10 December 2026. At that point, BepiColombo will become the first mission to have two spacecraft orbiting Mercury simultaneously.
The MTM itself has no computer or antenna to communicate with Earth. After separation, it will circle the Sun indefinitely. It is expected to pass by Mercury at a distance of about 130,000 kilometers in late October, then drift into interplanetary space, never to approach the planet again.
For the people involved in the mission, this video is more than a technical record. It captures the culmination of years of careful navigation and engineering, showing how a spacecraft can use the gravity of other worlds to steer itself toward a target as challenging as Mercury. The planet's proximity to the Sun makes it difficult to reach, and this journey was a testament to the patience and precision required for such a mission.
As the two orbiters begin their scientific work, the MTM's role is over. But its legacy, now visible in this video, is the path it helped pave to the innermost planet.
