2 spacecraft headed to Mercury are about to begin their long-awaited arrival for Europe and Japan — watch it live on Sept. 3

The BepiColombo mission is finally getting ready to arrive at its exotic destination.

BepiColombo launched in October 2018 and took a long, looping and highly circuitous route toward Mercury our solar system's innermost planet.

That journey is now nearly over, and the mission is gearing up for arrival.

BepiColombo's two science orbiters — one run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the other by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) — will separate from their power and propulsion module on Thursday (Sept.

3) at around 8 a.m.

EDT (1200 GMT).

You can watch that milestone live here at Space.com, courtesy of ESA, starting at 7:45 a.m.

EDT (1145 GMT).

Artist's impression showing the Mercury Transfer Module (at bottom) separate from the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) composite spacecraft. (Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab) ESA will pause the webcast at 8:30 a.m.

EDT (1230 GMT), then resume it an hour later to cover the mission teams' acquisition of signals from the newly free-flying orbiters.

Those communications links are expected to be established no earlier than 9:53 a.m.

EDT (1353 GMT), according to ESA officials.

The webcast will chronicle that activity, as well as some spacecraft status checks, before ending between 10:15 and 10:45 a.m.

EDT (1415 to 1445 GMT).