Mercury's north pole has been revealed in brilliant new images as a spacecraft zooms past the planet to capture a close-up image

The spacecraft has snapped some of the best close-up images yet of Mercury's north pole.

The European and Japanese robotic probe swooped as close as 183 miles above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. The European Space Agency released stunning images Thursday, showing permanently shadowed craters on the surface of our smallest, innermost planet.

“Flying over the 'terminator' – the boundary between day and night – the spacecraft had the unique opportunity to peer directly into the permanently shadowed craters of the planet's northern hemisphere,” ESA said in a statement.

ESA added that there is evidence that the craters contain icy water, and the spacecraft will investigate this feature further after orbiting the planet.

The cameras also captured views of the neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's giant crater, which spans over 930 miles.

This was the sixth and final Mercury flyby with the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. The program has put the spacecraft on track to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. This spacecraft carries two orbiters, one European and one Japanese, which will orbit the poles of the planet.

The spacecraft is named after the late Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo, a 20th-century Italian mathematician who contributed to NASA's Mariner 10 mission to Mercury in the 1970s and, two decades later, to the Italian tethered satellite project Space Agency that flies to the US. space shuttles.

BepiColombo was developed by UK company Astrium, now Airbus, and launched in 2018, according to the BBC.

“The main phase of BepiColombo may begin two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have provided us with valuable new information about the little-explored planet,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo project scientist at ESA. “Over the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unlock as many mysteries of Mercury with data from this flyby as possible.”