Kourou, French Guiana, Oct 20 (EFE).- BepiColombo, the first European space mission to Mercury, successfully took off from the European spaceport in Kourou Saturday, enroute to the smallest planet of our solar system, which is also closest to the Sun, in an attempt to decipher its many unknowns.
The Ariane 5 rocket took the transfer module and the two scientific orbiters, the Planet Orbiter, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter by its Japanese counterpart, JAXA, with whom the mission is jointly launched, left the Kourou space centre in French Guiana at 01.45 GMT on Saturday (22.45 local time on Friday).