BepiColombo Lets Go: Eight Years, Nine Flybys, One Irreversible Moment

Anna and Avery cover BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury beginning today, as the ESA/JAXA mission jettisons the transfer module that has carried it for nearly eight years and nine planetary flybys. Plus: NASA awards Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a dedicated Mars communications orbiter, Hubble confirms a brand-new ten-sided cloud pattern at Saturn's south pole — first spotted by amateur astronomers, one of them in outback New South Wales — and China's Galactic Energy flies its reusable Pallas-1 rocket for the first time.

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This episode includes AI-generated content.