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Europe’s and Japan’s BepiColombo released the closest images of the inner planets, flying into Mercury’s shadow to look at holes that are forever hidden in the shadows.
BepiColombo, made up of two connected spacecraft, flew past Mercury for the sixth and final time on Wednesday, using the planet’s gravity to change its trajectory for its 2026 approach. The project was launched in October 2018 as a joint venture between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), each providing an orbiter to explore Mercury. On its most recent flyby, the twin spacecraft flew past Mercury at a distance of about 295 kilometers, according to ESA.
From this distance, BepiColombo took pictures of the slopes of Mercury, starting with the cold, dark night of the planet near the northern hemisphere before moving to its northern regions.
Using its monitoring cameras (M-CAM 1), BepiColombo observed its closest boundary that separates the day and night of Mercury. In the image above, the Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer craters can be seen cast across Mercury’s surface, creating endless shadows that may contain pockets of water ice.
Indeed, the main goal of this project is to find out if Mercury keeps water in its shadows, even though it is close to the Sun.
The Caloris Basin, the largest crater on Mercury, is 1,500 kilometers across and can be seen in the lower left of this image.
Although Mercury is a very dark planet, its small features (or recent scars) appear bright on the surface. Scientists don’t know what Mercury is made of, but the material that has been mined from the Earth’s surface darkens over time.
In this third image, volcanic activity and impact are shown as the main factors responsible for the bright regions of Mercury. “The bright area near the surface of the planet in this image is Nathair Facula, the result of a large eruption of Mercury. At its center is a crater 40 kilometers (25 miles) across where there have been three major eruptions,” ESA wrote.
BepiColombo is only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury; a planet that cannot be reached by the Sun’s gravity. The two BepiColombo probes, made up of ESA’s Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO), were launched together on the same spacecraft, and each will enter its orbit around Mercury at the end of 2026. The mission made its first flight. of the earth in October 2021 and has been returning well close-up images of the solar system’s smallest planetand valuable data about this wonderful world.
“The main part of BepiColombo’s mission may only begin two years from now, but all six of its Mercury missions have given us new information about this little-explored planet. In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to explore its mysteries as much Mercury data from this flyby as possible,” Geraint Jones, BepiColombo project scientist at ESA, said in a statement.
