"Serena is alive!" It was the first enthusiastic comment, at 10:18 on the 12 December 2018, from the SERENA at the Esoc Center of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt (Germany), where they successfully concluded the functioning tests of the SERENA instruments, on board the BepiColombo probe, started last October 19th by Kourou (French Guiana), and now travels over 22 million km away from us.
The test lasted four days and consisted in lighting up all the Serena sensors and testing the functionality of its detectors and the complex particle tracking systems. This involved in particular the use of high voltage systems whose real functionality was fully verifiable only in flight. In a phase of the mission in which the satellite communication signal with the Malargue antenna (Argentina) required 66 seconds, the "tension" of the operators joined the "high tensions" of the instruments. So the satisfaction of seeing SERENA in good health and fully functional was great.
Serena was the last of the Near Earth Commissioning Phase and successfully completed the commissioning campaign for the entire BepiColombo payload.
