Brand new close-up images of the planet Mercury have been released by the European Space Agency.
The images of the closest planet to the Sun were captured by ESA's BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025, during its sixth and final flyby of the rocky world.
More on BepiColombo
BepiColombo flew 295km above the planet's north pole, capturing images of potentially icy craters in permanent shadow and sunlit northern plains.
The flyby was the spacecraft's final 'gravity assist manoeuvre’, which is required to steer it into orbit around Mercury in late 2026.
These images mark the final close-up views of Mercury to be captured by the spacecraft's M-CAM instruments.
The spacecraft module that the M-CAMs are attached to will separate from the mission's two orbiters – ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter – before orbit around Mercury in 2026.
Here are three of the best images captured by BepiColombo at Mercury during its sixth and final flyby.
Cold, ice and shadow
Just as Earth's Moon has a 'terminator' – the line dividing day and night on the surface – so too does Mercury.
This moody image of Mercury shows its cratered surface, the terminator line throwing light and shadow on ancient impact scars, accentuating their features.
It was captured by BepiColombo's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) and shows shadowed craters at Mercury's North Pole.
The rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer cast permanent shadows on the crater floors.
As a result, these craters are some of the coldest places in the Solar System, even though Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun.
Is there ice water on Mercury? If so, there's evidence that it could be found in these very craters, and BepiColombo is primed to investigate this very question when it enters orbit around the planet.
Ancient lava flows
A somewhat smoother region of Mercury, this is Borealis Planitia, made up of a vast expanse of volcanic plains.
Planetary scientists say these smooth plains were formed by lava erupting from beneath the surface of Mercury 3.7 billion years ago.
Ancient lava flooded craters like Henri and Lismer, which are indicated in the labelled version of the image below.
Scientists calculate the wrinkles seen on the surface were formed over billions of years, after the lava was solidified, likely a result of the planet cooling and contracting over time.
Bottom left is the Caloris basin, Mercury's largest impact crater spanning over 1,500km.
Above it can be seen a bright, curved feature on the surface.
This lava flow seems to connect to a deep trough below it and looks the same colour as both the lava on the floor of the Caloris basin and the lava of Borealis Planitia.
Did this ancient lava flow into the Caloris basin, or out of it? Yet another mystery that BepiColombo could solve.
Ancient explosions
Scientists don't yet fully know what Mercury is made of, but say that new material brought up from the surface darkens with age.
And so, brighter features are younger features.
This third image from the BepiColombo flyby, taken by M-CAM 2, shows ancient volcanic activity and large impacts, both of which are responsible for bringing new material to the surface of Mercury.
The bright patch at the top of Mercury's disk in this image is the Nathair Facula, the remnants of the largest volcanic explosion on Mercury.
Its core contains a volcano vent measuring 40km across that planetary scientists say has seen at least three major eruptions throughout its history.
The volcanic deposit is at least 300km in diameter.
To the left is the young Fonteyn crater, formed just 300 million years ago.
Scientists can tell it's a young feature because of the brightness of the impact debris that's radiating outwards from it.
More to discover
Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; Mercury: NASA/JPL
"This is the first time that we performed two flyby campaigns back-to-back. This flyby happens a bit more than a month after the previous one," says Frank Budnik, BepiColombo Flight Dynamics Manager.
"Based on our preliminary assessment, everything proceeded smoothly and flawlessly."
"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," says Geraint Jones, BepiColombo's Project Scientist at ESA.
"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."
