Navigating BepiColombo during the weak-stability capture at Mercury

Abstract

BepiColombo is scheduled for launch in August 2013 and to arrive after a nearly six-year long transfer at Mercury in June 2019. The trajectory has a number of challenging elements: a launch with Soyuz/Fregat into a geostationary transfer orbit, followed by a lunar flyby, long low-thrust arcs and five more planetary flybys (one at the Earth, two at Venus and two at Mercury). At arrival the low thrust arcs reduce the approach velocity so much that BepiColombo passes by the Sun–Mercury Lagrange points L 1 and L 2 and gets weakly captured in a highly eccentric orbit around Mercury in case the orbit insertion manoeuvre would fail. This paper describes the navigation strategy during the final phase. Five trajectory correction manouevres during the last 65 days requiring up to 20 m/s (3 σ) are proposed. With this strategy it is possible to navigate BepiColombo safely through the weak-stability boundary of Mercury and to reach the target periherm with a precision of 11 km.