Mark McCaughrean of ESA Talks BepiColumbo - The Cosmic Companion VIP Newsletter 13 December, 2021

BepiColumbo readies for Mercury, plus Comet Leonard, a "mystery hut" on the Moon?, and looking forward to the James Webb Space Telescope...

The BepiColumbo mission will mark just the third time spacecraft have visited Mercury. We talk with Mark McCaughrean of the European Space Agency about this historic program.

The BepiColumbo spacecraft, imagined over Mercury. Image credit: The Cosmic Companion / NASA

This week on Astronomy News with The Cosmic Companion, we welcome Mark McCaughrean, Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration at the European Space Agency, to the show. We'll talk about the European Space Agency's BepiColumbo mission to Mercury.

We're also going to look at Comet Leonard as it makes its closest approach to Earth this week, and we'll tell you how to find it in the night sky. We're going to hear about an odd finding from a Chinese lunar rover on the far side of the Moon, and we look forward to the launch of the most advanced telescope ever sent into space – the James Webb Space Telescope.

Here’s tomorrow’s episode of the show, in an advance showing for our VIP subscribers: