BepiColombo snaps Mercury’s dark craters and volcanic plains

These photos of Mercury’s pockmarked surface will be the last we’ll see before the BepiColombo mission begins orbiting the innermost reaches of our solar system at the end of 2026.

Since its launch in 2018, the Japan-Europe joint spacecraft BepiColombo has flown near Mercury six times, slowing down with each successive approach and adjusting its flight path to make it easier to reach orbit. Although the mission’s main scientific instruments have not yet been used, the spacecraft’s surveillance cameras have provided us with the clearest view of Planet Swift ever seen.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released three of the most fascinating images from BepiColombo’s latest flyby on January 8, taken from some 300 kilometers above Mercury’s surface while flying over Mercury’s north pole and northern region. was published.

“I had to wake up at 5:30 a.m., but it was worth it when I started seeing close-up images in my shared folders,” he says. david rosary At the Open University, UK. “We studied several simulated views in advance and used them to devise an imaging strategy, and what we saw was better than expected.”

The image above was taken above Mercury’s north pole and shows the clear division between sunlight and darkness on Mercury, which researchers call the terminator line. Mercury has some of the hottest places in the solar system, where the sun’s rays shine down on its scorching surface, and some of the coolest places inside its craters, which are permanently shaded by their rims. there is.

Some of these shadowed crater areas can be seen lying along the terminator line in the image. “It was also amazing to look down at Mercury’s north pole and see the sunlit tip of the central peak inside Tolkien Crater, whose floor is in permanent shadow,” Rosalie says.

Scientists have found some evidence that these crater areas contain frozen water. One of BepiColombo’s main mission objectives is to discover whether and how much water really exists.

Mercury also has a vast volcanic plain known as the Borealis Planitia, which BepiColombo scouted during his flight. Researchers believe these plains were formed more than 3 billion years ago by vast lava flows that flooded pre-existing craters, some of which can be seen in the image above. Most of these floodplains are smooth, but there are some impact craters that appear to have formed more recently.

At 1,500 kilometers wide, the Caloris Basin is Mercury’s largest crater, visible as a semicircular patch of light-colored ground extending from the horizon to the bottom left of the image. Once BepiColombo begins orbiting the planet, scientists hope to learn more about how the crater, the Borealis Planum, and the solidified lava flows between them are connected.

The bright region near the top of the planet in this image is called Natal Facula, and researchers believe it is the remains of the largest volcanic eruption in Mercury’s history. At the center of the region is a 40-kilometre-wide crater that appears to have been the source of at least three major eruptions, spewing volcanic material hundreds of kilometers across.

“[Nathair Facula] was on the brink of what we had hoped to uncover, but had published it based on images from previous NASA missions to Mercury, so we were excited to get a glimpse of it again. ” says Rosalie. “For some of BepiColombo’s instruments, it’s a very important science target when we get into orbit, because it’s a very important science target because Mercury’s composition has continued to have explosive volcanic eruptions throughout most of Earth’s history. Because it provides the best opportunity to find out why.”