The NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter and ESA/JAXA BepiColombo probes will execute Venus flybys just under 30 hours apart next week, leveraging gravity assists to optimize their trajectories.
Interplanetary travel demands efficient fuel use, as straight-line paths are impractical. Spacecraft engineers masterfully employ gravity assists—where a probe borrows a planet's gravitational pull to gain speed or adjust course—saving propellant and enabling complex missions across the solar system.
These maneuvers often chain multiple planetary encounters. Remarkably, Venus will host two such flybys in quick succession.
On August 9 at 6:42 a.m. (French time), the Solar Orbiter will skim 7,995 km from Venus. This pass will tilt it out of the ecliptic plane, accelerating it toward a prime vantage 42 million km from the Sun—roughly Mercury's distance—for unprecedented polar observations.
Per ESA experts, high-resolution Venus images won't be feasible, as the probe must orient its solar panels sunward.
The next day, August 10 at 4:48 p.m. (French time), BepiColombo will pass even closer at ~550 km from Venus, refining its path to Mercury arrival in 2025. This marks its second Venus flyby; six Mercury encounters follow before orbital insertion.
BepiColombo's main camera stays stowed, but two monitoring cameras will capture low-res black-and-white views.
At Mercury, BepiColombo deploys two orbiters: ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) for comprehensive surface mapping, and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) to probe the planet's magnetic field and magnetosphere.
