This is

the B. S. I and the world. I'm John Bachelor. Bob Zimmerman is here.

The website is behind the black and we're going exploring.

Bob tells me there's trouble. That means we must rally ourselves to worry

about Beepi Columbo. What is that, Bob? It's been a while.

Beepi Colombo is a joint Italian Japanese mission European Space Agency

you're Italian though a Japanese mission to the planet Mercury. It's an orbit

that's going to go around Mercury but, but it's two different spacecraft.

When it gets to mercury, the Japanese and the European sections will split and they'll do different

work complementary to each other in different orbits.

But until they get to mercury, they're together.

And to get to mercury has been complicated.

It has involved a lot of flybys of Earth and other planets

and Mercury included.

And it's on its way, and it's supposed to arrive in 25.

But this week a potentially serious problem was revealed.

They were preparing to do a cross correction. they turned on the thrusters, and it turned out that the

thrusters were not getting enough electrical power from the solar panels to produce the thrust necessary to do these cross corrections. And so they're now analyzing

they've managed to get the thrust up to about 90% of its planned amount. This spacecraft has a fly-by, the last major flyby of Mercury in

September of this year, and then it will head to it to go into orbit around Mercury and 25.

What they are unclear about is whether this problem

of the thrust of the engines

...