Bepicolombo slams the dark craters of Mercury and the volcanic plains

These images of the surface of the Mercury pot are the latter that we will see before BEPICOLOMBO mission Begins in orbit around the most interior world of the solar system at the end of 2026.

Since its launch in 2018, the European Spouse-Japanese Spotial Spotial Exhibition has stolen by Mercury six times, using each successive approach To reduce its speed and adjust its flight trajectory to facilitate orbit. Although the main scientific instruments of the mission have not yet been used, the surveillance cameras of the spacecraft have given us some of the clearest opinions that we have ever had from the rapid planet.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has now published three of the most captivating images of the last overview of Bepicolombo on January 8, taken about 300 kilometers above the surface of Mercury while it was flying in the northern and northern regions of the planet.

“It meant getting up at 5:30 am, but once the images in close -up began to appear in our shared file, it was worth it,” said David Rothery at the open university, in the United Kingdom. “We had studied simulated views in advance and used them to design our imaging strategy, but what we saw was better than expected.”

The above image, taken care of from the North Pole on the planet, shows the clear division between sunlight and darkness on Mercury, which researchers call the Terminator line. Mercury has some of the hottest temperatures in the solar system where sunlight falls on its burnt surface, but it also has some of the coldest, craters that are permanently shaded by their rims.

Some of these shaded crater regions can be seen along the Terminator line in the image. “It was great by looking at the North Pole of Mercury, and even seeing the sunny tip of the central peak inside the Tolkien crater, whose soil is in the permanent shadow,” explains Rothery.

Scientists found Some evidence May these crazy regions contain frozen water. One of the main objectives of Bepicolombo's mission is to discover if this water really exists and how many there is.

Mercury also contains a large volcanic plain known as the Borealis Planitia, which Bepicolombo spied on its overview. The researchers think that these plains were formed from large flows of lava more than 3 billion years ago which flooded existing craters, some of which can be seen in the image above. Most of these flooded plains are smooth, with a few impact craters that must have been more recently formed.

The Callorization Basin, which, 1500 kilometers wide, is the largest crater in mercury, appears as a semi-circular soil plot of lighter color extending from the horizon down to the left of the image. Scientists hope to know more about how this crater, Borealis Planitia and solidified lava flows are connected once Bépicolombo begins orbit around the planet.

The brilliant region near the top of the planet in this image is called Nathair Facula, and researchers think that this is the rest of the largest volcanic eruption in Mercury. The center of the region is a 40 -kilometer volcanic vent, which seems to have been the source of at least three huge eruptions which spat volcanic equipment for hundreds of kilometers.

“(Nathair Facula) was on the verge of what we expected to do, but after having published on the basis of images of the previous mission of NASA in Mercury, it was exciting to plot it again,” said Rothery. “This is a very important scientific objective for several of the instruments of bepicolombo when we enter into orbit, because it offers our best chances to determine what the composition of Mercury has enabled explosive volcanic eruptions to pursue a large part of the history of the planet.”