Stunning new images of Mercury show the scorched planets north pole

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What does life look like when you’re the closest planet to the sun?

New images of the Mercury taken by a robotic spacecraft have just been released — and they show the scorched planet in fascinating up-close detail.

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The photos were released by the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of BepiColombo, a mission in partnership with Japan to send a spacecraft to Mercury. This latest round of photos comes via the spacecraft’s sixth flyby of the solar system’s smallest planet, taking it less than 300km above Mercury’s surface.

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Let’s go in for a close-up of those.

A spacecraft is seen over a black-and-white image of a cratered planet surface.

Shadowy craters can be seen on Mercury’s north pole.
Credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

A black-and-white image shows a spacecraft over a planet.

On Mercury’s northern hemisphere, the cratered surface has been smoothed in many places by lava.
Credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

The Nathair Facula, the aftermath of Mercury’s largest volcanic explosion, and a future target for BepiColombo’s data gathering.
Credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

“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 BepiColombo’s Project Scientist at ESA, Geraint Jones, in a statement. “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.”

BepiColombo launched in 2018, and is due to land on Mercury’s surface in late 2026. The spacecraft will then split into two orbiters that will spend the next year travelling the planet to gather data.

You can visit the ESA’s site for a more detailed breakdown of those images, or read about previous flybys here.

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New images of Mercury’s surface have been released by the ESA, taken by the BepiColombo mission as it passed close to the planet’s surface.