Steve Barnes' World of Happiness

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A close pass of Venus.

A quick space exploration update: a probe has just returned a short film of Venus from a gravity-availing pass en route to Mercury.

ESA's "BepiColombo" probe was named for a mathematician who tackled the problem of injecting an object into a small planet's orbit while hurtling toward the sun – a much trickier task than doing the same with further planets, it turns out. But that's for another time.