Spacecraft whiz by Mercury’s north pole and beam back stunning images

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up images to date Mercury’s North Pole.

The European and Japanese robotic explorer swept as close as 183 miles (295 kilometers) across Mercury’s night side 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 top of our solar system’s smallest, innermost planet.

Cameras also captured views of nearby volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest impact crater, which stretches over 1,500 kilometers.

This was the sixth and final flyby of Mercury for the BepiColombo spacecraft since then launch in 2018. The maneuver put the spacecraft on track to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft has two orbiters, one for Europe and the other for Japan, which will orbit the planet’s poles.

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 Italian space agency’s tethered satellite project that flew the U.S. space shuttles.

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