Incredible footage of an Earth flyby of the BepiColombo spacecraft!

On 10 April, 2020, the spacecraft BepiColombo passed Earth at the extremely low height of 12,700 km above the ground. It did this get a gravity assist to send it to Mercury (though it'll pass Venus twice on its way). As it zipped by us it took a sequence of images animated here to show the Earth growing large, then cutting to the view from Earth as the spacecraft fell into our planet's shadow and faded away, then back to BepiColombo to show an incredible view of Earth, and finally as it leaves the Earth shrinks in the background, joined by the Moon (watch just over the solar panel on the right)! I stitched together four separate animations to make this.

Credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

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Space,astronomy,space exploration,Mercury,BepiColombo,Earth,science,ESA,JAXA,space travel,