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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — 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 (295 kilometers) 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 of our solar system’s smallest, innermost planet.
Cameras also recorded images of adjacent volcanic plains and the largest impact crater on Mercury, measuring over 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) across.
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 in honor of the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, an Italian mathematician from the 20th century. He played a significant role in NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury during the 1970s and, twenty years later, was involved in the Italian Space Agency's tethered satellite project that was launched aboard U.S. space shuttles.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Science and Educational Media Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. However, the AP retains full responsibility for all of its content.
