Operational Challenges of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo Mission

The BepiColombo Mission, an interdisciplinary cornerstone mission developed in collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), will be launched in August 2013 towards Mercury from Kourou using a Soyuz/Fregat rocket. The mission will be controlled from the European Space Operations Center of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, where all the other ESA interplanetary missions are also controlled. This paper presents the new operational challenges that the operators will have to accommodate compared to previous missions, and assesses their impact on the ground segment development.