A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury’s north pole taken from just a few hundred kilometres above its surface.
In its sixth and final flyby of the planet, the BepiColombo spacecraft captured extraordinary close-up images of icy craters and vast sunlit northern plains.
During the flyby, the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission came within around 295 kilometers of the tiny planet’s north pole.
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The BepiColombo spacecraft, built by Astrium, now Airbus, has completed six flyby missions of Mercury since it was launched on October 20, 2018.
Three best images acquired by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft during its sixth Mercury flyby on January 8 2025 -Credit:ESA/BepiColombo/MTM
It has successfully completed the final ‘gravity assist manoeuvre’ needed to steer it into orbit around the planet in late 2026 after making nine flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury so it could reach the right speed to be captured by Mercury’s gravity.
“This is the first time that we performed two flyby campaigns back-to-back. This flyby happens a bit more than a month after the previous one,” Frank Budnik, BepiColombo Flight Dynamics Manager said in a statement. “Based on our preliminary assessment, everything proceeded smoothly and flawlessly.”
“BepiColombo’s main mission phase may only start 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 next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries with the data from this flyby as we can,” added Geraint Jones, BepiColombo’s Project Scientist at ESA.
BepiColombo’s cameras also captured views of neighbouring volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles.
The spacecraft captured images of Mercury’s shadowy North Pole -Credit:ESA/BepiColombo/MTM
ESA said: “While M-CAM’s images might not always make it appear so, Mercury is a remarkably dark planet. At a first glance the cratered planet may resemble the Moon, but its cratered surface only reflects about two-thirds as much light.
“On this dark planet, younger features on the surface tend to appear brighter. Scientists don’t yet know what exactly Mercury is made of, but it is clear that material brought up from beneath the outer surface gradually becomes darker with age.”
The spacecraft is named after the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician. Colombo contributed to NASA’s Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and to the Italian Space Agency’s tethered satellite project that flew on the US space shuttles two decades later.