The flyby will help the BepiColombo spacecraft reduce its speed so that it can enter Mercury's orbit in two and a half years.
"As BepiColombo starts feeling Mercury's gravitational pull, it will be traveling at 3.6 km/s [2.2 miles per second] with respect to the planet. That's just over half the speed it approached during the previous two Mercury flybys," Budnik said.
There will be three further Mercury flybys before BepiColombo is finally slow enough to be captured by the rocky planet, which is only somewhat larger than Earth's moon: in September 2024, in December that same year and the final one in January 2025.
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