Mercury Mission
FILE - This undated image provided by the European Space Agency shows close-up photos of Mercury's north pole captured by the European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo.
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Two Mercury-bound spacecraft are in the home stretch of their nearly decade-long voyage. The linked spacecraft — one European, the other Japanese — separated from their mother ship on Thursday. If all goes well, they'll enter orbit around Mercury in November and split from each other in December to map and study the planet. The BepiColombo mission launched in 2018. It's named for the Italian mathematician who took part in NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s. Only one other spacecraft, NASA's Messenger, has explored our solar system's smallest and closest-to-the-sun planet.
