A paper on the Mercury exploration mission BepiColombo, co-authored by Mr. Kinoshita from Yoshioka Laboratory, has been published.
A paper co-authored by Gaku Kinoshita, a first-year doctoral student in Yoshioka Laboratory, has been published in Earth, Planets and Space!
The Mercury exploration mission BepiColombo is currently traveling through interplanetary space toward its goal of entering Mercury’s orbit at the end of 2026 (see this article for the Yoshioka Lab’s contributions to the BepiColombo mission!). During its cruise phase, BepiColombo has observed numerous solar plasma ejections, contributing valuable data for exploring the inner heliosphere.
This newly published paper summarizes seven years of BepiColombo’s cruise-phase observations and discusses the mission’s contributions to space weather research.
Mr. Kinoshita has been leading the calibration and analysis of cosmic ray monitoring instruments onboard BepiColombo (see Kinoshita et al., 2025, JGR), and he wrote the sections describing the instruments and the analysis of solar events (mainly Sections 5.3–5.4).
Paper information
Beatriz Sanchez-Cano … Gaku Kinoshita (12th author) et al.
“BepiColombo cruise science: Overview of the mission contribution to heliophysics,” Earth, Planets and Space, 77, 114 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40623-025-02256-z