Spacecraft buzzes Mercury’s north pole and beams back stunning photos

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury’s north pole. The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles above Mercury’s night side before passing directly over the planet’s north pole. The spacecraft is named for the late Giuseppe 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. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.