Mercury is a weird planet. It’s incredibly hot on the side facing the Sun (800 degrees), but very cold on the side facing away from the Sun — 290 degrees below zero, colder than any place on Earth — even though it’s much closer to the Sun than the Earth is. Mercury rotates only once every 59 days, so if you were on Mercury, you’d face into the burning hot Sun for weeks with no relief whatsoever, then face away from the Sun in utter darkness and frigid cold for weeks.
Now, a British space probe is learning more about Mercury:
A spacecraft built in the UK has captured new images of Mercury as it made its sixth and final flyby ahead of entering the planet’s orbit in 2026. BepiColombo was built by the Stevenage-based company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018.
The spacecraft comprises two satellites that will gather data for at least a year, and needs special shielding to withstand the heat from the sun. Monitoring cameras on the spacecraft captured images of the planet as it flew 295km (183 miles) above Mercury’s surface, including views of the planet’s north poles, as it was lit by sunlight.
BepiColombo will attempt to determine what Mercury is actually made of, and whether water could exist in some of the planet’s deepest craters.
It needed to make nine flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury before it could reach the right speed to be captured by Mercury’s gravity. This flyby marks the last time that the monitoring cameras will capture close-up images of Mercury, as the spacecraft module they are attached to will now separate from the mission’s two satellites before they go into orbit.
A NASA spacecraft recently made the closest-ever approach to the sun to gather images of the sun’s outer layers.
Last year, an Indian mission to the sun gathered information about the sun’s outer layers, using an array of instruments to measure and collect images of those layers. And a Chinese space probe to the far side of the moon returned to Earth with rare moon rocks.
In 2023, India and Japan became the fourth and fifth countries to achieve a soft landing on the moon.
