Spacecraft Captures Spectacularly Detailed Images Of Mercury's Hidden Surface
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Europe and Japan's BepiColombo beamed back close-up images of the solar system's innermost planet, flying through Mercury's shadow to peer directly onto craters that are permanently hidden in the shadows.
BepiColombo, consisting of two conjoined spacecraft, flew past Mercury for the sixth and final time on Wednesday, using the planet's gravitational pull to adjust its trajectory for an eventual orbital insertion in 2026. The mission launched in October 2018 as a joint venture between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), each providing an orbiter to explore Mercury. During its latest flyby, the twin spacecraft flew above the surface of Mercury at a distance of around 180 miles (295 kilometers), according to ESA.
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 sunlit northern regions.
Using its monitoring cameras (M-CAM 1), BepiColombo got its first close-up view of the boundary that separates the day and night side of Mercury. In the image above, the rims of Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer craters can be seen littered across the surface of Mercury, casting permanent shadows that may contain pockets of frozen water.
Indeed, a key goal of the mission is to investigate whether Mercury holds water in its shadows, despite its close proximity to the Sun.
The massive Caloris Basin, Mercury's largest impact crater, stretches more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) across and is visible at the bottom left of the image.
Although Mercury is a largely dark planet, its younger features (or more recent scarring) appear brighter on the surface. Scientists aren't quite sure what Mercury is made of, but material that had been dug up from beneath the surface of the planet gradually grows darker with time.
ESA released a movie of the flyby you can download.
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