The European Space Agency (ESA)’s BepiColombo mission has made another flyby of Mercury, capturing fascinating images of this lesser-studied inner planet. On January 8, 2025, the spacecraft made its sixth flyby of the small planet located close to the sun, taking advantage of the planet’s gravity to adjust its course so it can enter orbit in 2026.
On the flyby, the spacecraft passed within just 180 miles of Mercury’s surface, enabling it to capture close-up images of the planet. It passed the planet’s night side, which faces out into space and away from the sun, then over its north pole before swinging over to see its north hemisphere in the sunlight. The images were captured with the spacecraft’s three monitoring cameras, called M-CAM 1, 2, and 3, which take black-and-white images with a resolution of 1024 x 1024. Despite this relatively low resolution, the images are still scientifically valuable as they show many of the planet’s surface features.
There won’t be any more close-up images of Mercury from the monitoring cameras in the future, as the spacecraft is scheduled to split into several different parts. In addition to the Mercury Transfer Module, which is the part of the spacecraft that is responsible for carrying the mission to Mercury, there are also two orbiters called the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, which will split off to enter orbit. As the monitoring cameras are on the Mercury Transfer Module, they won’t get the chance to take any more images of Mercury.
The images taken show the craters covering the surface, including those at the planet’s north pole, which are steep enough that their floors are in perpetual darkness. These dark regions could contain water ice, and investigating this possibility is a major aim for the mission.
It’s also not known exactly what Mercury is made of, so studying its composition in more detail is another aim for the mission and should help explain how the planet formed.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.