On June 7, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Ganymede than any spacecraft in more than two decades. Less than a day later, Juno made its 34th flyby of Jupiter. This animation provides a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby. For both worlds, JunoCam images were orthographically projected onto a digital sphere and used to create the flyby animation. Synthetic frames were added to provide views of approach and departure for both Ganymede and Jupiter.
With a simple Google Cardboard-style virtual reality (VR) viewer, you can experience how it feels to be a spacecraft hurtling past Earth. This 360-degree VR simulation of a flyby manoeuvre performed by ESA’s Mercury-bound BepiColombo spacecraft takes you on a trip past Earth at the distance of only 12 700 km, closer than the orbit of Europe’s navigational satellites Galileo.
The simulation displays the field of view of two of BepiColombo’s science instruments (MERTIS and PHEBUS) and two of its three MCAM selfie cameras during the gravity-assist flyby at Earth on 10 April 2020.
The simulation was created using the SPICE software developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and data generated by the European Space and Astronomy Centre (ESAC)in Spain.
BepiColombo, a joint mission of ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is on a seven-year cruise to Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System. Launched in October 2018, BepiColombo follows an intricate trajectory that involves nine gravity-assist flyby manoeuvres. In addition to the flyby at Earth, BepiColombo will perform two flybys at Venus and six at Mercury, its target planet. The manoeuvres slow down the spacecraft as it needs to constantly brake against the gravitational pull of the Sun in order to be able to enter the correct orbit around Mercury in 2025, ahead of commencing science operations in early 2026.
Credit: ESA SPICE Service/RHEA Group.
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The ExoMars 2016 spacecraft will build on past missions to Mars. From the pioneering Viking missions onwards, our knowledge of Mars has been transformed and we now have an extraordinarily detailed picture of the planet. There are dust storms, polar ice caps and four distinct seasons. Mars has the largest volcanic mountain in our solar system and a canyon stretching over 5000 kilometres.
This film covers what we have learnt in particular from Europe’s Mars Express mission. Since its arrival in 2003, it has found evidence of water on Mars, discovered methane in the planet’s atmosphere, mapped the structure and composition of the south polar ice cap, discovered auroras and made the closest ever flybys of Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons. Mars Express also helped scientists select the landing site for the NASA Mars Curiosity rover, which arrived in Gale crater in 2012.
More remains to be learnt from Mars. Not least, whether the methane results from geological activity or past or present life.
