The BepiColombo spacecraft has sent back some incredibly detailed images of Mercury’s north pole. The snapshots were collected during its closest ever flyby of our solar system’s smallest planet. You can check out the awe-inspiring images below.

Barely larger than our own Moon, Mercury orbits precariously close to the Sun at an average distance of roughly 58 million kilometres.

The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft achieved a monumental milestone on January 8, 2025, with its sixth and final flyby of Mercury. This maneuver brought the spacecraft to just 185 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury’s surface,

New images of the planet Mercury taken by a robotic spacecraft have just been released — and they show the scorched world in fascinating up-close detail.

A spacecraft has captured detailed images of Mercury's north pole, shedding new light on the mysterious side of the planet.

Within those shadows, it's thought, sits a layer of ice, preserving clues that could help us better understand Mercury's past and potentially its future. "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,

This is the third time a spacecraft has visited Mercury in the history of space exploration. BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras snapped detailed black-and-white photographs as it drifted just 295km above the innermost planet.