BepiColombo

BepiColombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, launched in October 2018 to study Mercury, the least explored of the solar system rocky planets. The spacecraft consists of two separate orbiters, one built by each agency, traveling together on a long cruise that uses multiple gravity assist flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury itself to slow down enough for Mercury gravity to capture it, since a direct approach would require prohibitively large amounts of fuel. The mission is named after Giuseppe Bepi Colombo, the Italian scientist who first proposed the gravity assist technique that made earlier Mercury exploration by Mariner 10 possible.