Mercury's closeup: European-Japanese space mission returns its 1st photos It's BepiColombo! Named after a short-lived Italian sitcom from the 1970s, BepiColombo successfully flew within 200km of Mercury's surface yesterday.
It's actually pretty damned difficult to put a craft into orbit around Mercury... This recent event was just a flyby. It's going to take another 4 years for Bepi to get into orbit around Mercury.
Let's not denigrate the achievements of JPL, NASA and other space agencies. It's actually pretty damned difficult to put any craft into orbit around any planet. It's just that Mercury, given its proximity to the Sun, has a different set of complications than, say, Mars.
True dat, but Mercury really is a different class of difficult. As that video I linked to said, we didn't even figure out how to get into orbit around Mercury until 1985!
