Check Out These Extraordinary New Images of Mercury

06:59 Central On January 8 European time, the Bepiccolombo spacecraft successfully performed its sixth flyby of Mercury, the innermost planet in the Solar System. It was a “gravity assist maneuver,” a move that used Mercury’s gravitational pull to alter the Bepiccolombo rover’s trajectory, bringing it into orbit around the planet by the end of 2026.

Bepiccolombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to study the composition of Mercury. The vehicle, consisting of two probes—ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter—was launched in fall 2018 and previously orbited the Sun.

When it approaches Mercury again, the vehicle will separate and the two probes will head to their dedicated polar orbits. Bepiccolombo’s scientific mission is scheduled for early 2027, when the probes will search for information about how the planet formed and whether some of its craters contain water in the form of ice.

Until then, we’ll have to make do with the details contained in these three images during a recent flyby of the car.