European and Japanese spacecraft make a close encounter, transmitting breathtaking images back to Earth.
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, reports the AP. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots on Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system's smallest, innermost planet. Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles.
This marked the sixth and final flyby of Mercury for the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. This maneuver set the spacecraft on a trajectory to enter orbit around Mercury by late next year. Onboard are two orbiters—one representing Europe and the other Japan—designed to orbit the planet's poles. The spacecraft is named after the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who played a significant role in NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s, and later contributed to the Italian Space Agency's tethered satellite project that was launched aboard US space shuttles two decades later.
(More Mercury stories.)
