Scientists of the Bepicolombo mission met at the Royal Observatory of Belgium

Tuesday, September 30, 2025, marked the beginning of a 3-day workshop gathering international members from the BELA and MORE experiments onboard the BepiColombo mission to Mercury.

The joint ESA and JAXA mission was launched in 2018 and is about to reach the end of its long voyage to Mercury where it is slated to insert into orbit at the end of 2026. Scientists are now actively perfecting all the necessary tools and techniques to make the most of the forthcoming measurements and scientific data, which will offer an unprecedented window into the elusive interior of the planet.

The Mercury Orbiter Radio-science Experiment (MORE) onboard BepiColombo will measure Mercury’s gravity field, including small temporal variations, for example due to tides. The BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) will map the surface of the planet with groundbreaking accuracy and will determine subtle motions caused by tides and rotation. The data from both these experiments will allow scientists, among which several from the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), to infer properties of the planet’s deep interior.

Scientists from the ROB also participated in another meeting on BepiColombo at the Paris Observatory on Thursday and Friday of the same week. Members of the SIMBIO-SYS team, the spectrometer and camera of BepiColombo, discussed the latest advances in the preparation of the data analysis. By precisely measuring the rotation of Mercury, SIMBIO-SYS will complement data from MORE and BELA to probe the deep interior of Mercury.

Van Hoolst is Co-I of MORE, Co-I of SIMBIO-SYS, team member and WG lead of BELA
Rivoldini is Co-I and WG lead of BELA
Yseboodt, R.-M. Baland, and J. Rekier are team members of BELA