Spacecraft Captures Spectacularly Detailed Images of Mercury’s Hidden Surface

Bepiclombo from Europe and Japan has returned close-up images of the innermost planet in the solar system, looking directly at craters that fly through Mercury’s shadow that remain permanently hidden in shadow.

Bepicalombo, consisting of two connected spacecraft, flew past Mercury for the sixth and final time on Wednesday, using the planet’s gravitational pull to adjust its trajectory for a final orbit insertion 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 provided an orbiter to explore Mercury. During its latest flyby, the twin spacecraft flew about 180 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury’s surface, according to ESA.

From this close distance, Bepiccolombo captured images of Mercury’s cratered surface, from the cold, permanently dark night side of the planet to the sunlit northern region near the north pole.

Using its monitoring camera (M-CAM 1), BepiColombo obtained the first close-up view of the boundary that separates Mercury’s day and night sides. In the image above, the rims of Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer craters can be seen littering Mercury’s surface, leaving permanent shadows that may contain pockets of frozen water.

In fact, one of the main goals of the mission is to investigate whether Mercury keeps water in its shadow despite its proximity to the Sun.

The massive Caloris Basin, Mercury’s largest impact crater, spans 930 miles (1,500 km) and is visible at the bottom left of the image.

Although Mercury is a largely dark planet, its youngest features (or recent spots) appear bright on the surface. Scientists aren’t sure what Mercury is made of, but material mined from beneath the planet’s surface gradually darkens over time.

In this third image, volcanic activity and large impacts are highlighted as key factors behind Mercury’s bright regions. “The bright patch near the planet’s upper edge in this image is the aftermath of the Nathair facula, Mercury’s largest volcanic eruption. The volcanic vent at its center is about 40 km [25 miles] It has been the site of at least three major eruptions across it,” the ESA wrote.

Bepiccolombo is the third spacecraft to visit Mercury; The elusive planet is difficult to reach due to the Sun’s strong gravitational pull. The two BepiColombo probes, consisting of ESA’s Mercury Planet Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO), have been launched together on a single spacecraft and will each enter their respective orbits around Mercury in late 2026. The mission made its first flyby of the planet in October 2021 and is coming back nicely Close-up image of the smallest planet in the solar systemAs well as valuable information about the mysterious planet.

“Bepicolombo’s main mission phase may begin just two years from now, but six flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet. Over the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unravel the many mysteries of Mercury with the information from this flyby,” Geraint Jones, BepiColombo’s project scientist at ESA, said in a statement.