The ESA–JAXA spacecraft BepiColombo flew past Venus on August 10 on its way to Mercury. Because its cameras are designed to look at a rocky dark planet and not a highly reflective layer of clouds, the images it captured mostly just show a hot, round thing. Which, to be fair, is what Venus is. It’s just nice when we can resolve features in the clouds. 

In addition to showing us a big round Venus, the images also capture bits of the spacecraft and showcase just how well the spacecraft’s cameras work, which was the real goal of these images. When missions fly past secondary targets, it allows the missions teams a chance to test their instruments and provides them with time to fix anything that might need to be fixed prior to arriving at their final destination. In this case, if the software for the cameras had done something weird, which it didn’t, the team behind BepiColombo would have had time to fix things before the craft gets to Mercury in 2025.

More Information

ESA press release