As you all have seen the launch was a complete success! For me it was the first rocket launch I saw live and I was not really prepared for all the emotions. Seeing Ariane 5 launching at night is just spectacular! The Ariane 5 performed flawlessly and the ESA team did a fantastic job in getting us a mission. Interestingly the only minor „issue“ they noticed is that the spacecraft seems a bit colder than expected - which is great news for our time at Mercury. Check out the ESA website for the selfies we got back of the deployed solar arrays and low and high gain antennas. It’s good to see it in telemetry - it’s even better to see it „with your own eyes“

I still can’t really believe that after working on this mission for 15 years we are finally on our way to Mercury. And lets not forget that MERTIS and a couple of other instruments will already get data during the Venus flybys and hopefully also during the Earth-Moon flyby - the latter still has to be officially approved. Now we are all eagerly waiting for the commissioning of the instruments which actually starts this week. For MERTIS the slot is the 13 and 14 of November.

So again - thank you for all the support and looking forward to adding some great Mercury science with BepiColombo!