The spacecraft captures stunningly detailed images of Mercury’s hidden surface

The BepiColombo spacecraft from Europe and Japan sent back close-up images of the innermost planet in the solar system, flying through Mercury’s shadow to look directly at craters permanently hidden in the shadow.

The BepiColombo spacecraft, made up of two attached spacecraft, flew by Mercury for the sixth and final time on Wednesday, using the planet’s gravitational pull to adjust its course for a 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 provides an orbiter to explore Mercury. During its last flyby, the dual spacecraft flew above the surface of Mercury at a distance of about 180 miles (295 kilometers), according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. European Space Agency.

From this close distance, BepiColombo captured images of Mercury’s cratered surface, starting on its cool and always dark night side near the north pole before moving toward the sunlit northern regions.

Using surveillance cameras (M-CAM 1), BepiColombo obtained the first close-up view of the boundary separating the day and night sides of Mercury. In the image above, the edges of Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer craters can be seen dotting Mercury’s surface, casting permanent shadows that may contain pockets of frozen water.

In fact, the main goal of the mission is to verify whether Mercury retains water in its shadow, despite its proximity to the Sun.

The massive Caloris Basin, Mercury’s largest impact crater, extends more than 930 miles (1,500 km) and can be seen at the bottom left of the image.

Although Mercury is a largely dark planet, its newer features (or more recent scars) appear brighter on the surface. Scientists aren’t exactly sure what Mercury is made of, but materials extracted from beneath the planet’s surface gradually become darker over time.

In this third image, volcanic activity and large impacts are highlighted as major factors behind Mercury’s brighter regions. “The bright patch near the planet’s upper edge in this image is the Nathair Facula, the aftermath of the largest volcanic eruption on Mercury. At its center is a volcanic vent about 40 kilometers (25 miles) wide that has been the site of three large eruptions on Mercury,” the European Space Agency wrote. “The least.”

BepiColombo is the third spacecraft to visit Mercury; The elusive planet is difficult to reach due to the Sun’s strong gravity. The BepiColombo probes, made up of ESA’s Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO) and ESA’s Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO), were launched together on a single spacecraft, and each will enter its own orbit around Mercury in late 2026. Its first flight. The planet is in October 2021 and it has made a wonderful return Close-up images of the smallest planet in the solar systemIn addition to valuable data about the mysterious planet.

“The main phase of the BepiColombo mission may begin only 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 project scientist at the European Space Agency, in a statement. His statement: “In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries as possible using the data from this flyby.”