Euro-Japanese spacecraft took sharpest photo of Mercury in 6 years as it flew over the planet

Mercury is finally back in the spotlight, with a space probe passing its crater surface for the first time in six years.

As it flew over Mercury on Friday, the BepiColombo spacecraft took the above photo 1,500 miles (2,418 kilometers), about 10 minutes after flying over the planet. The image shows ancient lava fields in the northern hemisphere of Mercury.

This is the first good look at BepiColombo on its target planet since its launch in 2018. The spacecraft is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). It is set to orbit Mercury in 2025, when it maps the planet’s surface, analyzes its composition, and detects its magnetic field. Scientists hope that all of this data will reveal the story of the planet closest to the sun.

But first, BepiColombo must move past Earth, Venus, and Mercury, leveraging the gravity of the planets to pull itself toward its ultimate orbital path. The spacecraft has already flown over Earth and Venus. Friday marked the first of six Mercury overflights.

“The flyby was flawless from a spacecraft perspective, and it’s amazing to finally see our target planet,” Elsa Montagnon, the mission’s spacecraft operations manager, said in a press release.

The last time a spacecraft flew this close to Mercury was in 2015, when NASA’s Messenger probe took one last look at the planet’s craters before crashing into its surface.

BepiColombo images show Mercury fading in the distance

BepiColombo’s photos of Mercury are so detailed that scientists can identify particular craters, named Rudaki, Lemontov, and Calvino.

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But BepiColombo is not even using its best lens yet. Images of Friday’s flyby come from its black-and-white surveillance cameras, but the spacecraft also has a suite of high-resolution cameras that it will deploy once it finally reaches orbit of Mercury.

ESA gathered 53 images from the BepiColombo flyby in a video, below, to show the planet fading in the distance as the spacecraft moved away.

On its closest approach, the spacecraft was only 199 kilometers above the surface of Mercury, but it was on the side of the planet farthest from the sun, plunged into nocturnal darkness.

BepiColombo didn’t see Mercury well until it had already passed and the sunny side of the planet was in sight. The closest image to this sequence is about 620 miles (1000 km) from Mercury.

“It was very exciting to see the first images of Mercury from BepiColombo and understand what we were seeing,” said David Rothery, who heads ESA’s Mercury Surface and Composition Working Group, in the communicated. “It made me even more excited to study the high quality scientific data that we should get when we orbit Mercury, because it is a planet that we do not yet fully understand.”

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