The European BepiColombo Science Ground Segment—Overview and tasks

BepiColombo is a joint ESA–JAXA mission to inner planet Mercury, to be launched in 2014. The task of the BepiColombo Science Ground Segment is to coordinate the scientific planning of the BepiColombo payload, to coordinate the commanding, the data processing, and the long-term archiving of the payload data. This is done reusing a lot of experience from previous planetary missions, both on ESA and JAXA side. This paper gives an overview of the currently foreseen setup and documents the state of the current long-term plan.