Japanese Space Agency names arrival date for BepiColombo Mercury mission
Jump to main content
Search
REG AD
Science
Japanese Space Agency names arrival date for BepiColombo Mercury mission
Due on November 21, eleven months late - but on time to do science!
Simon Sharwood
Simon<br>Sharwood
APAC Editor
Published<br>tue 26 May 2026 // 05:10 UTC
Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has offered a definitive date for the BepiColombo mission’s arrival at Mercury.<br>BepiColombo is a joint effort between JAXA and the European Space Agency. The mission involves three craft: A vehicle called the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), which carries the ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).<br>The MTM’s primary role is getting the two orbiters to Mercury, but mission boffins have used its cameras to snap images of Earth, Venus and Mercury in the seven-and-a-half years since its October 2018 launch.
REG AD
The mission plan called for the MTM to swing around the Earth once and Venus twice, plus six loops around Mercury. A thruster glitch saw mission planners revise that itinerary and meant the probe would arrive in orbit at Mercury in November 2026 – eleven months later than first planned.
REG AD
In a Monday Xeet from a JAXA X account dedicated to the MMO, the Japanese space agency revealed the exact date BepiColombo will arrive: November 21.
MORE CONTEXT
NASA probes propulsion problem in Psyche's thrusters
Mercury probe BepiColombo thrusters are acting up, but science marches on
Ariane 5 to take final flight, leaving Europe without its own heavy-lift rocket
China sends cloud powered by homebrew Loongson CPUs into space
“We'll gently be captured by Mercury's gravity and enter orbit,” the Xeet states, before adding that Japan’s orbiter will detach from the MTM on December 10.<br>Mission plans assume another few weeks will pass before either orbiter gets down to work.<br>BepiColombo is humanity’s third mission to Mercury, following 1973’s Mariner 10 and 2004’s Messenger. The MMO and MPO carry instruments that, it’s hoped, will help to enhance our understanding of Mercury’s interior and magnetosphere.<br>We currently know very little about Mercury because it is so close to the Sun that spacecraft must avoid being trapped by the massive gravity of Earth’s nearest star, which makes navigation and ongoing operations complicated. Once spacecraft do reach Mercury, temperatures are fierce even hundreds of kilometres above the planet’s surface. The ESA has used the example of a laptop that can work inside a pizza oven to illustrate the difficulties its probe will face and loaded its MPO with radiators and 94kg of insulation to protect its instruments.<br>The planet, our solar system’s smallest and most dense, also defies observation from telescopes because the Sun shines so brightly it can damage sensitive optics.<br>BepiColombo’s imminent arrival therefore brings hope that humanity can learn more about a planet that, thanks to its speedy orbit, is often closer to Earth than any other. ®
jaxa<br>mercury<br>science<br>bepicolombo<br>esa<br>solar system<br>space
REG AD
OSes
ReactOS brings its Windows NT tribute act to ARM64
Experimental build boots on Raspberry Pi 5, but for now the joy is mostly in getting there
Legal
Google engineer accused of turning Year in Search secrets into Polymarket payday
Feds say insider used confidential search trend data to score $1.2M in prediction market profits
THE REGISTER EXPLAINER
Explainer: Edge AI
You can run AI at the edge, if your infrastructure supports it
On-Prem
Kyndryl takes employees' pulse while cutting off circulation for some
Redundancy notices and sentiment survey land in inboxes on same day in what tech services biz calls 'commitment to listen'
Systems
EU's digital sovereignty boo-boo may be the best thing to ever happen to the project
DIY or die. Just don't let the CIA buy it
Personal Tech
EU moderation watchdog says social media giants hate taking down hate speech
Also somehow censoring too much while refusing to hand over account ban evidence for review
MOST POPULAR
AI + ML
Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately
Security
Anthropic to release Mythos-class models to the public
Systems
Intel's CEO reveals early hiring challenges as bankruptcy concerns deterred top talent
Operating Systems
Linus Torvalds to ‘start being more hardnosed’ about ‘pointless pull requests’ – some of which come from AIs
Security
America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames
EVENTS
The Hardware Crunch: How Supply Chain Turbulence Is Forcing a New IT Playbook
Infrastructure teams are facing a perfect storm: extended hardware lead times, rising costs driven by AI demand, and accelerated platform timelines.
Overcoming the trade-offs in data sovereignty
What does data sovereignty actually mean for your network, which trade-offs are unavoidable? Learn...