BepiColombo spacecraft separate from carrier as they near Mercury after decade-long journey

Two components of the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission successfully separated from their carrier spacecraft on Thursday, marking the final phase of a nearly ten-year journey toward Mercury. The separation was confirmed after a two-hour radio wait, with the operation broadcast from the European Space Agency’s control centre in Germany, more than 124 million miles from the probe.

"It’s a brilliant moment," said lead project scientist Geraint Jones.

If the trajectory proceeds as planned, the probe will enter Mercury’s orbit in November and the two spacecraft will detach in December to conduct complementary mapping at different altitudes. At the time of separation the craft still had about 2 million miles to travel.

The mission, named after Italian mathematician Giuseppe Bepi Colombo, follows a complex path that has taken the probe over 6 billion miles and required nine planetary flybys to shed enough velocity for Mercury capture. The most recent flyby in January 2025 produced high-resolution images of the planet’s craters and volcanic plains.

"How tiny Mercury is and still it holds some of the biggest mysteries of our solar system," mission manager Santa Martinez said earlier this week.

Starting next spring, a suite of scientific instruments on both the European and Japanese modules will examine Mercury’s magnetic field, interior density, and surface geology, including the so-called hollows that may be formed by volatile loss from rocks. Engineers designed the spacecraft to endure extreme thermal conditions, with ESA operations chief Ignacio Tanco likening the environment to “a very hot pizza oven running right on your back.”

The European Space Agency is financing the majority of the roughly $2 billion mission, with scientific observations expected to commence in the coming months.