Europe and Japan’s BepiColombo has beamed close-up images of the solar system’s innermost planet, flying through Mercury’s shadow to look directly at craters forever hidden in shadow.
BepiColombo, consisting of two connected spacecraft, flew past Mercury for the sixth and final time on Wednesday, using the planet’s gravity to adjust its trajectory for its final orbital entry in 2026. The mission was 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 test it. Mercury. During the latest flyby, the two spacecraft flew above Mercury’s surface at a distance of about 180 miles (295 kilometers), according to ESA.
From this close range, BepiColombo captured images of Mercury’s cratered surface, starting with the cold, permanently dark night side near the northern hemisphere before moving to its sunlit northern hemispheres.
Using its monitoring cameras (M-CAM 1), BepiColombo obtained its first close-up view of the boundary that separates day from night on the side of Mercury. In the image above, the rims of the Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer craters can be seen dotting the surface of Mercury, creating permanent shadows that may contain pockets of frozen water.
Indeed, the main goal of this mission is to investigate whether Mercury holds water in its shadow, despite its proximity to the Sun.
The large Caloris Basin, Mercury’s largest crater, stretches more than 930 miles (1,500 km) across and is visible in the lower left of the image.
Although Mercury is a very dark planet, its smaller features (or recent scars) appear brighter. Scientists aren’t exactly sure what Mercury is made of, but the material that was mined underground gradually darkens over time.
In this third image, volcanic activity and large impacts are highlighted as key factors behind Mercury’s bright regions. “The bright spot near the upper edge of the planet in this image is Nathair Facula, the result of a large volcanic eruption on Mercury. At its center is a 40 km volcanic area [25 miles] beyond that there were at least three large explosions,” ESA wrote.
BepiColombo is only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury; The strange planet is difficult to reach because of the Sun’s gravity. The two BepiColombo probes, which include ESA’s Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO), have been launched together into the same space, and each will enter its orbit around Mercury in late 2026. This mission made its first flight. of the planet in October 2021 and has been returning beautiful close-up images of the solar system’s smallest planet, as well as 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 provided us with important new information about the little-explored planet.” Over the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to solve as many of Mercury’s mysteries with data from this flyby as possible,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo project scientist at ESA, in a statement.