Category: Missions

After nearly eight years traveling through the inner solar system, the trailblazing BepiColombo spacecraft has finally begun its arrival at Mercury.

The joint European Space Agency (ESA)-Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission reached a major milestone today (Sep. 3), entering its arrival phase at one of our sun's least-studied planets. BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), the main power and propulsion system that has ferried a dual stack of planetary probes through space for nearly eight years, released its payload to kick off a sequence of operations that will ultimately place the two spacecraft in Mercury's orbit.

The separation left ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, known as Mio, together for their final approach, which will take about six more months. "It will basically be a new mission starting today," said Bruno Sousa, ESA's head of operations definition and engineering, during today's mission livestream.

BepiColombo launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, on Oct. 19, 2018, beginning a journey that was expected to take about seven years. To assist its plunge sunward, the spacecraft's trajectory has included one flyby of Earth, two of Venus and six of Mercury, as it has shed more and more gravitational energy during to slow its approach to the system's innermost planet.

"It's one of the most complicated missions we have ever flown," Sousa said. The mission was made even more complicated in April 2024, when a solar panel issue reduced the available power for MTM's electric thrusters. Engineers devised a lower-thrust trajectory that saved BepiColombo's mission but delayed its Mercury arrival from December 2025 to November 2026.

Today's maneuver doesn't place BepiColombo in orbit around Mercury quite yet. MPO and Mio will spend the next several weeks navigating toward the planet ahead of orbital insertion on Nov. 21. "Arriving to Mercury is not as simple as other missions that do a big maneuver and they are there," said Elsa Montagnon, BepiColombo's operations manager. "In our case, it's going to be six months of continuous activities."

The Nov. 21 arrival will begin a sequence of 16 maneuvers to progressively lower and reshape BepiColombo's orbit. Mio is scheduled to separate from MPO around Dec. 9 and settle into a highly elliptical polar orbit. MPO will jettison Mio's MOSIF sunshield (Magnetospheric Orbiter Sunshield and Interface Structure) on Dec. 16, then continue lowering its own altitude before reaching its own polar orbit on March 10, 2027.

BepiColombo is scheduled to begin science operations on April 6, 2027, with MPO and Mio studying Mercury simultaneously from complementary orbits. MPO will focus on Mercury's surface composition, geology and planetary interior, while Mio will investigate the planet's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind.

Today's separation took place at 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), but confirmation of that event didn't come for more than an hour following its scheduled execution. Acquisition of signal from BepiColombo came just before 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), followed by a positive telemetry reading indicating the spacecraft was where it was supposed to be.

"I'm again extremely relieved," Montagnon said. "That the telemetry comes exactly at the moment we expect it, and that we see in the telemetry that the configuration of the spacecraft is the correct one," she said, "this is the best case scenario."

Blue Origin will build NASA's next Mars orbiter.

The agency announced on Tuesday (Sept. 1) that it has selected Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company to develop the $700 million Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN), which is expected to be up and running at the Red Planet by 2030.

"The award marks a milestone in NASA's strategy to expand communications and navigation services beyond Earth and the moon, establishing the foundation for sustained exploration of Mars in the coming decades," NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

As its name suggests, the MTN — previously known as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter — will primarily serve to aid NASA science missions rather than gather data of its own.

The MTN is "a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions," NASA officials said in the statement.

The need for such a data-relay craft is expected to become acute in the coming years as NASA's fleet of current Mars orbiters ages and the agency works to prepare the Red Planet ground for crewed missions in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

At the moment, just two NASA orbiters relay data and commands between the agency's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers and their handlers on Earth — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The European Space Agency's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft help out as well.

All four of these orbiters are gathering science data of their own, however. The MTN will not have a split focus; it will be a dedicated communications craft.

NASA got $700 million for a Mars telecom orbiter in July 2025, when Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill. The agency laid out requirements for the spacecraft in February of this year, then issued a request for proposals in May.

Blue Origin and Rocket Lab were viewed as the front-runners for the contract, and both pushed hard for it, touting their bona fides and expertise.

Blue Origin won out in the end, however. The company will base MTN on its Blue Ring spacecraft platform, which it describes as "an all-in-one, high-powered hybrid solar electric and chemical propelled spacecraft that provides unmatched mission maneuverability, versatility, and capacity at dramatically lower profile costs."

Blue Ring has not flown a mission yet, but a prototype version of it went to space on the first-ever launch of Blue Origin's powerful New Glenn rocket in January 2025. Though Blue Ring can fly on other rockets as well, MTN will presumably launch on a New Glenn; the newly announced NASA contract calls for Blue Origin to "design, develop, integrate, launch and operate" the Mars telecom mission.

The contract calls for Blue Origin to deliver the spacecraft to NASA no later than Dec. 31, 2028.

NASA's next big space telescope is not only meant to unlock some of the mysteries of dark energy. It also is a pioneer in the naming of missions.

Scientific American recently said that the observatory, which launched on Aug. 30, is the first ever space telescope ever named after a real-life woman: American astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who supported development of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and was NASA's first head of astronomy in the 1960s.

The story is very different when it comes to men. For example, NASA's "Great Observatories," which launched between 1990 and 2003, were all named after famous U.S. male astronomers or physicists: the Hubble Space Telescope (Edwin Hubble), the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (Arthur Compton), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (Lyman Spitzer).

Indeed, relatively few spacecraft of any kind have borne female names over the years — and most of the ones that did were not honoring actual, real-life people.

For instance, a number of missions with female names took them from mythology (e.g., NASA's Europa Clipper and China's Chang'e moon probes). Others used female names not attached to particular individuals (such as NASA's Clementine moon mission, and the European Space Agency's LISA, which is an acronym for "Laser Intraferometer Space Antenna.")

A notable exception is Sojourner, the mini-rover on NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander mission that was made famous again by the 2015 film "The Martian;" it's named after Sojourner Truth, a Civil War-era abolitionist. Sojourner's name was selected in 1995 from a worldwide naming contest for students and suggested by 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Some other notable examples of missions honoring real-life women include:

• ESA's long-delayed ExoMars rover Rosalind Franklin, which is now set to launch to Mars in 2028. It's named after a British scientist who contributed to discovering the structure of DNA. (Part of the rover's mission is to analyze potential biosignatures on the Red Planet's surface.)
• The Cygnus International Space Station (ISS) resupply program, which is managed by Northrop Grumman. Multiple Cygnus freighters have been named after female NASA astronauts, including Janice E. Voss, Sally Ride and Kalpana Chawla, and one of them honored the American mathematician and "hidden figure" Katherine Johnson.
• Satellogic's ÑuSat/NewSat series. It has commonly named satellites after female historical figures in science, such as Black American chemist Alice Ball, Polish physicist-chemist Marie Curie and Australian radio astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott.
• Canada's GHGSat has a program in which employees name the company's Earth-orbiting satellites after family members, which has generated names from real-life people like Eleonore and Penny.
• The U.S. Space Force nicknamed its GPS III Space Vehicle-08 "Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson," another nod to the mathematician

What this means

Throughout history, the names of ocean-going ships — ships on the water, not spaceships — often have associations with women. The U.K.'s Imperial War Museums (IWM) suggests that women's names are used due to two traditions. The first is that, very generally speaking, the word "boat" is a "female" word in some languages that use gendered nouns, but that is by far not universal, even among the imperial sailing powers of the 1400s to 1600s.

The second association, which seems more likely, is the notion of a mother, goddess or similar "female figure" guiding a crew, which we see in theaters right now with "The Odyssey:" Athena helps Odysseus, reflecting the ancient Greek epic story. (For example, figureheads — sculptures on sailing ship prows — were often, although not always, carved in the likeness of women, Royal Museums Greenwich states.)

There are famous sailing ships with female names that many Americans can cite, such as the nicknames for the three Spanish ships — the Niña, Pinta and Santa María — used by Christopher Columbus during his famed first voyage to the New World in 1492.

"There's always been a tradition to name ships — and oftentimes after women," Valerie Neal, emerita curator in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's department of space history, told Space.com. Neal's research includes extensive work on female astronauts.

The U.S. space program has historically leaned upon mythological names of both genders for its missions, she noted, citing the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo human spaceflight programs as examples of male monikers. These days, Neal added, the education system is less tilted toward introducing children to old Greek or Roman myths, which may explain why it's now more common to name missions after real-life individuals.

In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, "there was a big debate at the time of the space shuttle naming whether to name the space shuttles after historic figures, or after concepts," Neal said. "One idea was even after Native American tribes." (For example, Tafuna High School in American Samoa recommended the name "Hōkūle'a" for shuttle, as noted in NASA's 1991 monograph "From Ship to Shuttle: NASA Orbiter-Naming Program")

The space shuttles were ultimately named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour after "historic ships of exploration," Neal said. You can read more about the origins of those names in this piece by The Space Foundation.

The Cygnus spacecraft "USS Janice Voss," which flew to the ISS in 2014, was the first U.S. orbital mission known to Neal to be named after a woman. "She had had an affiliation with the Orbital Sciences Corporation, and so they wanted to honor her," said Neal, referring to a previous company that managed the Cygnus program.

The flock of Cygnuses named after women — at least six of them, according to Neal — is "a good sign that people are starting to think of contemporary figures, or more contemporary, [and] naming spacecraft as a tribute to them, and to their contributions in science and exploration and discovery."

Naming a flagship space telescope after Nancy Grace Roman is another good sign, of course. And choosing her for this honor makes sense; she was in "a class by herself — because her name is so directly associated with astronomy and large space telescopes" like Hubble, Neal said.

"It is recognizing her significance in the history of space exploration as a leader who made so much possible, through her own work as an astronomer, but then as an administrator and manager at NASA made possible the orbiting solar observatories, the orbiting astronomical observatories — and then Hubble and the other great observatories that followed."

Roman's name on the telescope, she added, is "elevated" because "her name coincides exactly with the spacecraft and its purpose, whereas the names of the astronauts that are attached to the [ISS] resupply missions … not all of them had any connection to the International Space Station. Several did, but not all."

Neal said she's hopeful that more women will see their names attached to space missions, including both those historical astronomers who saw "their bosses were getting all the credit" as well as the numerous non-male scientists making impacts in the field today.

"I think it's entirely possible that, in time, there will be another major observatory named for a woman," Neal added. She noted that recommendations from the science community every 10 years form the basis of new space missions, and that the next such "decadal survey" in astrophysics is expected to wrap up around 2030.

In the nearer term, NASA is considering ideas such as an ultraviolet telescope, an advanced X-ray imaging satellite, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory for launch in the 2030s or early 2040s, presenting more opportunities to attach female names to flagship space missions.

Sidebar: Female mission names

With thousands of flown or planned missions to space, and numerous parts making up each spacecraft, it is difficult to compile a comprehensive list of probes or instruments that have had female names. The following is therefore a partial list, though an extensive one. In no particular order, it includes:

• Telescopes/observatories: NASA's Roman, ESA's Gaia, NASA's Pandora, the British-American Ariel V telescope, ESA's NewAthena, ESA's Ariel, ESA's LISA, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
• Human spacecraft: Mercury Aurora 7, SpaceX's Crew Dragon Grace.
• Satellites/ISS missions: ESRO-1A and 1B's nicknames of Aurora and Boreas, multiple Cygnus ISS resupply spacecraft, much of the Satellogic NuSat/NewSat constellation, several GHGSat spacecraft, Space Force's GPS III Space Vehicle-08 (nicknamed Ms. Creola Katherine Johnson), and the Russian Resurs-DK1 satellite's multinational cosmic-ray module PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics).
• Moon: China's Chang'e series, the Soviet Union's Luna series, NASA's Artemis program and missions, Intuitive Machines' IM-2 lander Athena, JAXA's Selene/Kaguya, NASA's Clementine, the NASA ARTEMIS moon-orbiting probe.
• Venus: ESA's Venus Express, the Soviet Union's Venera series.
• Mars: ESA's Rosalind Franklin rover, NASA's Sojourner rover, JAXA's failed Nozomi orbiter.
• Jupiter/moons: NASA's Juno, NASA's Europa Clipper.
• Asteroids: NASA's Lucy, ESA's Hera.
• Other hardware: Some spacecraft/rocket parts have female names (e.g. the US military's Juno II rocket, Firefly Aerospace's Miranda engine, ESA's Europa and Ariane rockets).

The following at first glance appear to have female names, but either were not confirmed before this story's deadline or were confirmed to have other origins:

• Japan's MUSES Program (Mu Space Engineering Spacecraft), which may or may not reflect the English/Ancient Greek meaning of goddesses of knowledge.
• DoD's ALEXIS (the Array of Low Energy X-ray Imaging Sensors) and JAXA's Akatasuki (Venus Climate Orbiter) may not just reflect female names.
• NASA's Uhuru, which is not named after the female "Star Trek: The Original Series" character but after the Swahili term for "freedom."
• NASA's Dawn is meant to reflect the solar system's beginning, and not a person.
• The Soviet Vega series to Venus is meant to be VeGa, or as National Geographic once wrote, "a contraction of the Russian words for your dual targets, Venera and Gallei."

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to studying the universe after spending months in a low-drag configuration while awaiting an orbital rescue mission that ultimately fell short.

Mission controllers restarted two of Swift's three science instruments — its X-ray Telescope (XRT) and Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) — on Aug. 26. Both instruments had been shut down in February as part of an effort to minimize atmospheric drag and keep the aging spacecraft in orbit long enough for another spacecraft to reach and boost it to a higher altitude, according to an Aug. 28 statement from NASA.

Swift's third instrument, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), remains offline. Operations of the BAT were halted in April to conserve power, allowing controllers to position Swift's solar panels in a way that further reduced drag from its interaction with Earth's atmosphere. NASA says the mission team hopes to resume data collection with the instrument within the next few weeks.

"Over the last 21 years, Swift has been NASA's multitool for studying the cosmos," NASA officials said in the statement. "It observes a wide range of light, rapidly points at short-lived outbursts, and sends alerts to other facilities in space and on the ground to help coordinate follow-up observations."

The return to science follows NASA's decision to abandon plans to boost Swift's orbit using LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft built by the Arizona company Katalyst Space. LINK launched July 3 aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket with the ambitious goal of rendezvousing with Swift, grabbing the observatory and raising its orbit.

However, the rescue mission encountered trouble in late July when LINK developed attitude-control problems that caused it to spin and disrupted communications. Two of the spacecraft's three reaction wheels were found to be inoperable, while its cold-gas thruster system also experienced some loss of functionality.

Although engineers managed to reduce LINK's spin and regain attitude control, NASA and Katalyst announced Aug. 19 that the spacecraft would no longer attempt to capture and boost Swift. Instead, LINK is expected to rendezvous with Swift and perform proximity operations, providing an opportunity to demonstrate technologies that could be used for future in-space satellite servicing missions — leaving Swift without the orbital boost intended to extend its life and its future increasingly uncertain.

Launched in 2004, Swift was originally designed for a two-year mission studying gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. More than two decades later, the observatory continues to detect and rapidly follow up on fleeting cosmic events in gamma-ray, X-ray, ultraviolet and visible light, while alerting other observatories so they can turn their attention to the same targets.

Unlike some spacecraft in low Earth orbit, Swift doesn't have a propulsion system capable of counteracting atmospheric drag. Increased solar activity has heated and expanded Earth's upper atmosphere, increasing the drag on Swift and causing its orbit to decay faster than previously expected.

NASA's low-drag operations had been expected to keep Swift above an altitude of about 185 miles (300 kilometers) until October. Below that threshold, operating the observatory becomes increasingly difficult and its descent accelerates, NASA officials said in the statement.

Now that science operations have resumed — and the planned orbital boost is off the table — NASA expects Swift to reach that critical altitude within the next one to two months. Without intervention, the observatory is likely to crash back to Earth later this year, mostly burning up as it reenters the atmosphere, according to the space agency.

For now, the veteran space telescope is making the most of the time it has left — and once again scanning the universe.