A spacecraft, a robotic explorer built through the joint effort of the Japanese and European Space Agencies, has flown within 183 miles above Mercury’s night side before passing directly over the planet’s north pole.

The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system’s smallest, innermost planet.

Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers).

The BepiColumbo spacecraft has been doing flybys of Mercury for years, since its launch in 2018. This flyby was the last of six, and puts the craft on course to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft holds two orbiters, one for Europe and the other for Japan, that will circle the planet’s poles.

The robotic explorer  is named for 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 U.S. space shuttles.

Things to Know About Mercury

The surface of Mercury is similar to the Moon’s in appearance, and is only slightly larger than Earth’s natural satellite, making it the smallest of the true planets in our star system. It’s also the fastest, whipping around the sun every 88 Earth days. Because it’s so close to the Sun, its surface temperature can reach highs of 800°F (430°C). Without an atmosphere to retain that heat at night, temperatures can dip as low as -290°F (-180°C). This tiny world is covered top to bottom in craters from collisions with meteors and comets. Intercrater plains cover about 70% of the planet’s surface and are picked with small craters. It’s also the densest planet after Earth, with a large metallic core.

With a radius of 1,516 miles (2,440 kilometers), Mercury is a little more than 1/3 the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, Mercury would be about as big as a blueberry.

Mercury’s highly eccentric, egg-shaped orbit takes the planet as close as 29 million miles (47 million kilometers) and as far as 43 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the Sun. It speeds around the Sun every 88 days, traveling through space at nearly 29 miles (47 kilometers) per second, faster than any other planet.

Mercury spins slowly on its axis and completes one rotation every 59 Earth days. But when Mercury is moving fastest in its elliptical orbit around the Sun (and it is closest to the Sun), each rotation is not accompanied by sunrise and sunset like it is on most other planets. The morning Sun appears to rise briefly, set, and rise again from some parts of the planet’s surface. The same thing happens in reverse at sunset for other parts of the surface. One Mercury solar day (one full day-night cycle) equals 176 Earth days – just over two years on Mercury.

Mercury’s axis of rotation is tilted just 2 degrees with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. That means it spins nearly perfectly upright and so does not experience seasons as many other planets do.