The BepiColombo robotic explorer - a joint venture between Europe and Japan - swooped as close as 295 km above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole.

The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet’s night side at 06:59 CET. In this view, Mercury’s terminator, the boundary between day and night, divides the planet in two.

BepiColombo made its sixth and final flyby of Mercury on Wed (Jan. 8) capturing images of the tiny planet hinting at the mysteries it will soon investigate.

From this close distance, BepiColombo captured images of Mercury’s cratered surface, starting with the planet’s cold, permanently dark night side near the north pole before moving toward its ...

This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. Flying over ...

Then, we are treated to images of the Borealis Planitia, the largest collection of plains on Mercury, formed by the unstoppable flow of lava some 3.7 billion years ago.

A spacecraft skimmed past Mercury this week, beaming back stunning new images of the surface and showing once again that humankind has a seemingly insatiable longing to understand the universe ...

This latest round of photos comes via the spacecraft's sixth flyby of the solar system's smallest planet, taken some 183 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury's surface.

BepiColombo, a joint European-Japanese mission, completed its latest flyby of Mercury, sending back a sneak peek of the cratered planet it will begin to orbit in 2026.

The joint European-Japanese mission is only the second survey of Mercury, the least explored planet in the inner solar system. A European-Japanese spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close ...