Spacecraft has brought back some of the best close up pictures yet of the north pole of Mercury.
The European and Japanese robotic explorer traveled as close as 183 miles above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. European Space Agency spread the amazing pictures Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of our solar system's smallest and innermost planet.
“Flying over the 'terminator' – the boundary between day and night – the spacecraft had a unique opportunity to look directly into the craters that forever shadow the north pole of the planet,” ESA said in a statement.
/AP
ESA said there is already evidence of frozen water in the craters, and the spacecraft will investigate this further after it is in orbit around the planet.
Cameras also captured views of nearby volcanic fields and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans 930 miles.
This was the sixth and final Mercury flyby for the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. The maneuver put the spacecraft on track to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft will hold two orbiters, one for Europe and the other for Japan, which will circle the poles of the planet.
The spacecraft is named for the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later, to the Space Agency's compact satellite project Italy flew on the US space shuttle.
/AP
BepiColombo was built by the UK company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018, according to the BBC.
“The main phase of the BepiColombo mission may only begin two years from now, but the six flybys of Mercury have given us valuable new information about the under-researched planet,” said Geraint Jones, scientist ESA's BepiColombo project. “Over the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to uncover as many of Mercury's secrets as we can with the data from this flyby.”
