A spacecraft has sent back some of the best photos taken so far of the North Pole of Mercury.
The European and Japanese robotic explorer zoomed up to about 295 kilometers above the night side of Mercury before passing directly over the planet’s north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots on Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters on the summit of our solar system’s smallest and innermost planet.
The cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest crater, which stretches more than 1,500 kilometers.
It is the sixth and final flyby of Mercury by the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. The maneuver put the spacecraft on course to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft contains two orbiters, one for Europe and one for Japan, that will orbit the planet’s poles.
The spacecraft is named after the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to the US Mariner 10 mission. POT to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later, to the Italian Space Agency satellite project that flew on the space shuttles of USA.