The spacecraft captures spectacularly detailed images of Mercury’s hidden surface

Europe and Japan’s BepiColombo has transmitted close-up images of the innermost planet in the solar system, flying through Mercury’s shadow to look directly at the craters that are permanently hidden in the shadow.

BepiColombo, consisting of two joined spacecraft, flew past Mercury for the sixth and final time on Wednesday, using the planet’s gravitational pull to adjust its trajectory for a possible orbital insertion in 2026. mission launched in October 2018 as a joint venture between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), each providing an orbiter to explore Mercury. During its last flyby, the twin spacecraft flew over the surface of Mercury at a distance of about 180 miles (295 kilometers), according to ESA.

From this close distance, BepiColombo captured images of Mercury’s cratered surface, starting with the cold and permanently dark night side of the planet near the north pole before moving towards its regions north of the sun.

Using its monitoring cameras (M-CAM 1), BepiColombo had its first close-up view of the boundary that separates day and night on Mercury. In the image above, the rims of the Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer craters can be seen scattered across the surface of Mercury, casting permanent shadows that may contain pockets of frozen water.

Indeed, a key goal of the mission is to investigate whether Mercury holds water in its shadow, despite its close proximity to the Sun.

The massive Caloris Basin, Mercury’s largest impact crater, stretches over 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) and is visible in the lower left of the image.

Although Mercury is a largely dark planet, its younger features (or newer scars) appear brighter on the surface. Scientists are not sure what Mercury is made of, but the material that had been dug up from under the surface of the planet gradually darkens over time.

In this third image, volcanic activity and large impacts are highlighted as key factors behind Mercury’s brightest regions. “The bright patch near the upper edge of the planet in this image is the Nathair Facula, the aftermath of the largest volcanic explosion on Mercury. In its center is a volcanic vent about 40 km (25 miles) across which is has been the site of at least three major eruptions,” the ESA wrote.

BepiColombo is only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury; the elusive planet is difficult to reach because of the powerful gravitational pull of the Sun. The two BepiColombo probes, consisting of ESA’s Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO), launched together on a single spacecraft, and each will enter its respective orbit around Mercury at the end of 2026. The mission carried out its first flyby. of the planet in October 2021 and it came back splendid close-up images of the smallest planet in the solar systemand also valuable data about the mysterious planet.

“The main mission phase of BepiColombo may begin only two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet. In the coming weeks, the BepiColombo team will will work hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries with the data from this flyby as we can,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo project scientist at ESA, in a statement.