Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "BepiColombo" in English language version.
The flyby itself was very successful", confirms Elsa. "The only difference to normal cruise phase operations is that near to Venus we have to temporarily close the shutter of any of the star trackers that are expected to be blinded by the planet, similar to closing your eyes to avoid looking at the Sun
The data collected for this image, even though it was submitted to the Minor Planet Center as artificial satellite 2018-080A (BepiColombo's official designation), led to it being mistaken for a Near Earth asteroid. The "discovery", announced by the Minor Planet Center as asteroid 2020 GL2, was retracted soon after. This was the third time a spacecraft had been mistakenly announced as a "new asteroid" during an Earth flyby, after Rosetta a.k.a. 2007 VN84 and Gaia a.k.a. 2015 HP116. Incidentally, all three of these are ESA missions.
Our #BepiColombo @esaoperations team confirm all went well with our #MercuryFlyby last night! Now we wait and see what images & data our instrument teams collected