In pictures: Mercury spacecraft captures stunning new images of one of the least explored planets

A European-Japanese spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole as part of only the second human survey of our solar system's innermost planet.

The BepiColombo robotic explorer - a joint venture between Europe and Japan - swooped as close as 295 km above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole.

The European Space Agency (ESA) released the stunning snapshots, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of the least explored planet in the inner solar system.

Cameras also captured views of neighboring, sunlit volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans over 1,500 km.

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This was the sixth and final flyby of Mercury for the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018, a manoeuvre that will assist the spacecraft in entering orbit around Mercury late next year.

Despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun, the pictured craters are some of the coldest places in the solar system. Evidence suggests they are filled with frozen water, one of the key mysteries the mission hopes to unravel once in orbit.

The spacecraft holds two orbiters, one for Europe and the other for Japan, that will circle the planet's poles.

The spacecraft 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 US space shuttles.