Stunning detailed images of Mercury have been clicked by BepiColombo as it made its sixth and final flyby ahead of entering the planet's orbit in 2026. The spacecraft, built by the Stevenage-based company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018, flew just a few hundred kilometres above the planet's north pole capturing the "icy craters whose floors are in permanent shadow, and the vast sunlit northern plains", according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
The images were revealed during a press briefing by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher on Thursday (Jan 9). As per the space agency, the dark craters clicked by BepiColombo's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) could have frozen water.
"The rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer cast permanent shadows on their floors. This makes these unlit craters some of the coldest places in the Solar System, despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun," said ESA, adding: "Excitingly, there is existing evidence that these dark craters contain frozen water.'
Whether there really is water on the planet will be investigated by BepiColombo once it is in orbit around the planet.
"BepiColombo's main mission phase may only start two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet," said Frank Budnik, BepiColombo flight dynamics manager.
"In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unravel as many of Mercury's mysteries with the data from this flyby as we can," added Geraint Jones, BepiColombo's project scientist.
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Mercury - an engima
Barely larger than our own Moon, Mercury orbits precariously close to the Sun at an average distance of roughly 58 million kilometres. During its stay in the Mercury orbit, BepiColombo is to uncover why the planet only has a thin veneer of rocks despite its oversized iron core, which represents 60 per cent of its mass.
Two years from now, the Bepicolombo Mercury Transfer Module will return to Mercury to release the ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter. Throughout 2027, the two agencies will be aiming to collect data from the respective machines, hovering at different altitudes and orientations above the planet.
