Stunning images of Mercury have been released revealing the sunlit plains and possibly icy craters of the solar system’s smallest planet.
The European Space Agency (ESA) released three images taken by the BepiColombo spacecraft on Thursday after the ship flew 183 miles (294 km) above the planet’s north pole.
Close-up images sent back to Earth showed possible ice craters, their floors in permanent shadow, and vast, sunlit northern plains.
Photo: ESA/AP
BepiColombo’s observation cameras (M-CAMs) also captured views of the nearby volcanic plains known as Borealis Planitia, which formed from a widespread eruption of liquid lava 3.7 billion years ago, the European Space Agency said on its website.
Mercury’s largest impact crater, more than 930 miles (1,496 kilometers) across, was also captured.
The European and Japanese robotic explorer flew over Mercury’s night side before passing directly over the planet’s north pole.
After flying through the planet’s shadow, BepiColombo got its first close-up views of Mercury’s surface.
The spacecraft flew over the boundary between day and night – known as the Terminator – and captured permanently shadowed craters at the planet’s north pole.
Named after Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer, the craters are among the coldest places in the solar system, even though Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.
This was the sixth time the spacecraft had flown close to the system’s innermost planet since its launch in 2018.
This is also the last time the mission’s M-CAMs will get any close-ups, as the associated spacecraft module will separate from the mission’s orbiters before entering orbit around Mercury in late 2026.
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The two probes, one belonging to Europe and the other belonging to Japan, will orbit around the poles of the planet.
BepiColombo is named after the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, the 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA’s Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later, to the Italian Space Agency’s tethered satellite project that flew in American space. . Shuttles.