Observing Mercury: from Galileo to the stereo camera on the BepiColombo mission.

After having observed the planets from his house in Padova using his telescope, in January 1611 Galileo wrote to Giuliano de Medici that Venus is moving around the Sun as Mercury. Forty years ago, Giuseppe Colombo, professor of Celestial Mechanics in Padova, made a decisive step to clarify the rotational period of Mercury. Today, scientists and engineers of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova and of the University of Padova, reunited in the Center for Space Studies and Activities (CISAS) named after Giuseppe Colombo, are busy to realize a stereo camera (STC) that will be on board the European (ESA) and Japanese (JAXA) space mission BepiColombo, devoted to the observation and exploration of the innermost planet. This paper will describe the stereo camera, which is one of the channels of the SIMBIOSYS instrument, aiming to produce the global mapping of the surface with 3D images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]