Mercury’s north pole seen in dazzling new images as spacecraft buzzes planet for a close-up photo shoot

A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury’s north pole.

The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles above Mercury’s night side before passing directly over the planet’s north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of our solar system’s smallest, innermost planet.

“Flying over the ‘terminator’ – the boundary between day and night – the spacecraft got a unique opportunity to peer directly down into the forever-shadowed craters at planet’s north pole,” ESA said in a statement.

ESA added that there is existing evidence that the craters contain frozen water, and the spacecraft will investigate this aspect more after it is in orbit around the planet.

Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles.

This was the sixth and final flyby of Mercury for the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. The maneuver put the spacecraft on course to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft holds two orbiters, one for Europe and the other for Japan, that will circle 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 on the U.S. space shuttles.

BepiColombo was built by the U.K. company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018, according to the BBC.

“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,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo’s project scientist at ESA. “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.”