BepiColombo is Europe’s first mission to Mercury, the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our Solar System.
It is a joint endeavour between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, and consists of two scientific orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).
The mission is named after the Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo (1920–84). He is known for explaining Mercury’s peculiar characteristic of rotating about its own axis three times in every two orbits of the Sun.
