A spacecraft on a seven-year journey to the planet Mercury, flew past Venus today, using the gravity of that Earth's neighbor to adjust its trajectory towards Mercury - the smallest planet, closest to the Sun.
Launched almost two years ago, the two-part European-Japanese probe "Bepi-Colombo" took a black-and-white picture of Venus from a distance of 17.000 kilometers, and the picture also includes a part of the "selfie" of the probe itself.
It was the second of nine "planetary gravity assists" required by the spacecraft during its journey to Mercury.
The first such "assistance" was a quick flyby around the Earth in April.
The European Space Agency indicated that this mission, which cost 1,3 billion euros, is one of the most challenging so far.
The extreme temperatures of Mercury, the strong gravitational force of the Sun and its radiation create "hellish conditions".
The "Bepi-Colombo" probe will once again fly around Venus, and six times around Mercury, to slow down before arriving at its destination in 2025.
In the final orbit around Mercury, the probe will be divided into two parts: the European orbital apparatus "Bepi" will descend to a lower, inner orbit around Mercury, and the apparatus "Mio" made by the Japanese Space Research Agency, will collect data from a higher altitude.
Both probes are built in such a way that at Mercury they can withstand temperatures ranging from 430 degrees Celsius on the side facing the Sun, to minus 180 degrees Celsius in the shadow.
Researchers hope the Bepi-Colombo mission will help them learn more about Mercury, which is only slightly larger than Earth's moon and has a massive iron core.
The last spacecraft to visit Mercury was the American NASA probe "Messenger", which completed its four-year mission in 2015.
Only once before that the probe flew past that planet, it was also American, "Mariner", almost half a century ago, in the mid-1970s.
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