A thin crescent receding into the distance is BepiColombo’s last view of Earth as it makes its way to the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System, Mercury.
This image was captured on 10 April 2020 as the spacecraft completed a gravity-assist flyby of our planet.
Having already travelled almost 1.4 billion kilometres since its launch in October 2018, the flyby was one of several gravity-assist manoeuvres the ESA/JAXA spacecraft must make in order to hit Mercury’s orbit in December 2025.
Find out more about the BepiColombo mission.
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Observatory BepiColombo spacecraft
Release date 10 April 2020
Image credit ESA/BepiColombo/MTM, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
