CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—A spacecraft has transmitted back some incredible close-up images of Mercury’s north pole.
The European and Japanese robotic explorer flew as close as 183 miles above Mercury’s night side before crossing directly over the planet’s north pole. The European Space Agency unveiled the breathtaking photos on Thursday, showcasing the perpetually shadowed craters at the top of our solar system’s smallest and innermost planet.
The cameras also captured glimpses of the nearby volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest impact crater, which measures over 930 miles in diameter.
The Mercury’s north pole taken by the European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo. European Space Agency via AP
This marks the sixth and final flyby of Mercury for the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. This maneuver has set the spacecraft on a trajectory to enter orbit around Mercury by late next year. The spacecraft is equipped with two orbiters, one from Europe and the other from Japan, which will orbit the planet’s poles.
The spacecraft is named after the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, an Italian mathematician from the 20th century who contributed to NASA’s Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and later to the Italian Space Agency’s tethered satellite project that flew aboard the U.S. space shuttles.
By Marcia Dunn
