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A 1h34 CEST la nuit dernière, @BepiColombo est passé à seulement 199 km de la surface de #Mercure, la planète rocheuse la plus proche du Soleil. Ce succès est le résultat de plusieurs mois de travail sur la trajectoire de la sonde pour son 1er rendez-vous avec sa planète cible. 
@BepiColombo "C'était impeccable. Tout était parfait du point de vue de la sonde, et comme prévu, #BepiColombo a vraiment commencé à ressentir la chaleur," a expliqué Elsa Montagnon 🇫🇷, responsable des opérations de vol de la sonde @BepiColombo.
#MercuryFlyby
#MercuryFlyby
@BepiColombo #BepiColombo file actuellement vers le centre du Système solaire. A 56 millions de km du Soleil, par une température d'environ 110°C, il s'agit d'un tout nouvel environnement pour la sonde.
#MercuryFlyby
#MercuryFlyby
Hello I am an astronomer, I have a small telescope and I’ve done lots of stargazing. I’ve never seen Mercury (it’s very close to the Sun) and I never pay attention to where it is in its orbit. The only impact it has on my life is unfortunate people blaming it for their troubles.
The thing people call “Mercury retrograde” is an accident of perspective by which if you WERE observing Mercury every night, sometimes it would appear a little east of where it was yesterday & sometimes a little west, from our perspective. But it’s just orbiting; nothing changes.
Unless you’re out there with a telescope and a sextant making charts of the position of a small dot near the Sun, you won’t observe apparent retrograde motion. Even if you were ON MERCURY you wouldn’t notice anything unless you were tracking Earth. It’s just not really a thing.
A flawless, radiant, #Mercuryflyby
After a flawless flyby of Mercury, @BepiColombo is starting to feel the heat.
After a flawless flyby of Mercury, @BepiColombo is starting to feel the heat.
At 01:34:41 CEST this morning, BepiColombo passed just 199 kilometres from the hot, rocky, innermost planet – the outcome of months of work to get the spacecraft into a precise trajectory for the first rendezvous with its target planet.
#MercuryFlyby
#MercuryFlyby
“It was flawless. Everything was perfect from the spacecraft point of view, and as expected, BepiColombo has really started to feel the heat,” explains Elsa Montagnon, Spacecraft #Operations Manager for the mission.
