This is a

CVS I in the world behind the block Bob Zimmerman is here. Bob what is Bepi Colombo's mission?

Bepi Colombo is a joint European Space Agency and Japanese Jackson Space Agency mission to Mercury.

It's actually made up of two orbiters, one from Europe and one from Japan, and they're attached to a passenger transfer module, which actually contains thrusters for providing course

corrections on the way to and into mercury orbit. To get to mercury it's

complicated they had a flyby of Earth, they had two flybys of Venus. They had three

flybys of Mercury and they have three more flybys to go. But between the third and fourth mercury flybys this

spring, they discovered that the thrusters on that transfer module were failing to produce the desired thrust. This is serious. It means they

don't have the power to do what they're supposed to do, to do the mid-course corrections and to

put the spacecraft into mercury orbit.

Both those orbit is once they get into orbit those will separate and they'll take

complementary orbits around mercury to cover different science.

It's actually a very good idea.

So what do you do? So they spent a lot of time analyzing

and they figured out what they can do is change the directory of the

spacecraft so that it can take advantage of the weaker thrusters to do what needs to be done.

It's speeded up by slingshot effect so that it makes up for the weaker thrust and they've done that.

The result, however, means that this spacecraft will arrive till

Mercury a year late it'll arrive in November 26 and instead of 25 but it'll work and

that's the important thing.

They will fly by the Earth later this week,

but fly very close to the Earth, only about 100 miles above the surface.

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