The spacecraft brought back some of the best close up photos yet of Mercury’s north pole.

The European and Japanese robotic explorer flew as far as 283 miles above Mercury’s night side before passing directly over the planet’s north pole. European Space Agency posted stunning footage Thursday, showing permanently shadowed craters atop our solar system’s smallest, innermost planet.

“Flying above the ‘terminator’ – the boundary between day and night – the spacecraft was given a unique opportunity to peer directly into the forever-shadowed craters at the planet’s north pole,” ESA said in a statement.

ESA added that there is evidence that the craters contain frozen water, and the spacecraft will investigate this aspect in more detail once it is in orbit around the planet.

The cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury’s largest impact crater, which stretches more than 930 miles.

This was the sixth and final Mercury flyby for the BepiColombo spacecraft since its launch in 2018. The maneuver put the spacecraft on course to enter Mercury orbit late next year. The spacecraft has two orbiters, one for Europe and one for Japan, which will orbit the poles of the planet.

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 U.S. space shuttles .

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

“The main phase of the BepiColombo mission may not begin until two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet,” said Geraint Jones, BepiColombo’s project scientist at ESA. “Over the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will be working hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries as possible with the data from this flyby.”