Mercury’s north pole has been seen in dazzling new images as the spacecraft flies around the planet for a close-up

Spacecraft has sent some of the best Close up photos Distance from Mercury’s north pole.

The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped 183 miles above Mercury’s night side before passing directly over the planet’s north pole. European Space Agency They shot amazing shots Thursday, permanently shadowed craters appear at the top of the smallest and deepest planet in our solar system.

“By flying over the Terminator – the boundary between day and night – the spacecraft got a unique opportunity to look directly into the eternally shadowed craters at the planet’s north pole,” the European Space Agency said in a statement.

The European Space Agency added that there is existing evidence that the craters contain frozen water, and the spacecraft will investigate this aspect further after it is in orbit around the planet.

The cameras also captured views of nearby volcanic plains and the largest meteorite crater on the planet Mercury, which extends more than 930 miles.

This was the BepiColombo spacecraft’s sixth and final flyby of Mercury since its launch in 2018. The maneuver put the spacecraft on track to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft carries two orbiters, one for Europe and one for Japan, which will orbit the planet’s poles.

The spacecraft is named after the late Giuseppe (Pepe) 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 in the U.S. United. Space shuttles.

BepiColombo was built by British company Astrium, now known as Airbus, and launched in 2018. According to the BBC.

“The main phase of the BepiColombo mission may only begin two years from now, but all six of its Mercury flybys have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo project scientist at ESA. “In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will be working hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries using the data from this flyby as possible.”