Giuseppe Colombo was a successful mathematician and engineer. Born in Padua, Italy, in 1920, he attended primary and secondary school in his home town. In 1944, he was awarded a PhD in mathematics from the University of Pisa, and subsequently returned to Padua, where he worked as an assistant and associate professor in theoretical mechanics. In 1955, he received full professorship in applied mechanics from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Padua. He mainly taught vibration mechanics and celestial mechanics, but also covered spacecraft and rockets during his last few years.

Better known by his nickname ‘Bepi’, Professor Giuseppe Colombo was significantly involved in planning the Mariner 10 mission of 1974–75 – the only Mercury mission to be completed so far. He proposed the probe’s trajectory, which included the first-ever swing-by manoeuvre around a planet – in this case Venus – which would set it on course for Mercury. Colombo is therefore considered the father of swing-by manoeuvres, during which light spacecraft can alter both their speed and their direction of flight by exploiting the gravitational force of planets.

Colombo was also the first to explain Mercury’s unusual period of rotation. Unfortunately, he did not live to witness the Giotto mission to Halley’s Comet launched in July 1985, which he had helped to initiate, as he died prematurely of cancer aged 64 in 1984. At its meeting in Naples in September 2003, ESA’s Science Programme Committee decided to name its European Mercury mission after Bepi Colombo, in honour of the man to whom we owe much of our present knowledge about the planet Mercury.