Pictures capture icy craters and sunlit plains of solar system's smallest planet

Stunning pictures of Mercury have been published revealing the sunlit plains and possibly icy craters of the smallest planet in the solar system.

Three pictures taken by the BepiColombo spacecraft were issued by the European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday after the vessel flew 183 miles (294km) above the planet's north pole.

The close-up images beamed back to Earth showed possibly icy craters, the floors of which are in permanent shadow, and vast sunlit northern plains.

BepiColombo's monitoring cameras (M-CAMs) also captured views of neighbouring volcanic plains known as Borealis Planitia, formed by the widespread eruption of runny lava 3.7 billion years ago, the ESA said on its website.

Mercury's largest impact crater, which is more than 930 miles (1,496km) wide, was also captured.

The European and Japanese robotic explorer flew over Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole.

After flying through the planet's shadow, BepiColombo got the first close views of Mercury's surface.

Flying over the boundary between day and night - known as the "terminator" - the spacecraft captured the permanently-shadowed craters at the planet's north pole.

Named Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer, the craters are some of the coldest places in the solar system, despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun.

It was the sixth time the spacecraft has flown past the system's innermost planet since its launch in 2018.

It's also the last time the mission's M-CAMs will get any close-ups, as the spacecraft module they are attached to will separate from the mission's two orbiters before they enter orbit around Mercury in late 2026.

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The orbiters, one by Europe and the other by Japan, will circle the planet's poles.

BepiColombo 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 Space Agency's tethered satellite project that flew on the US space shuttles.