MESSENGER Sends Earth the First Color Pictures of Mercury

In the first mis­sion to the dens­est planet in the solar system since the Mariner 10 space­craft vis­ited it in 1974 and 1975, NASA’s MES­SEN­GER probe made a his­toric flyby on Jan­u­ary 14, 2008, skim­ming just 200 Km above Mercury’s surface.

The MES­SEN­GER space­craft was launched on August 3, 2004 and the cur­rent approach is part of a set of gravity-​assisted maneu­vers that will put it in Mercury’s orbit by March 2011. MES­SEN­GER car­ries a wide- and narrow-​angle color and mono­chrome imager, a gamma-​ray and neu­tron spec­trom­e­ter, an X-ray spec­trom­e­ter, an ener­getic par­ti­cle and plasma spec­trom­e­ter, an atmos­pheric and sur­face com­po­si­tion spec­trom­e­ter, a laser altime­ter, a mag­ne­tome­ter, and a radio sci­ence exper­i­ment. The mis­sion aims at col­lect­ing data on the com­po­si­tion and struc­ture of Mercury’s crust, inves­ti­gate its topog­ra­phy, geo­logic his­tory and the natures of its thin atmos­phere and active mag­ne­tos­phere, as well as the com­po­si­tion of its core and polar materials.

The just-​received color pic­tures were made pos­si­ble by com­bin­ing images taken with dif­fer­ent fil­ters cov­er­ing the vis­i­ble and the infrared spec­tra. The result was an assort­ment of high-​resolution views in false-​color that accen­tu­ates dif­fer­ences in sur­face com­po­si­tion that would be unde­tectable to the human eye.

A full report on the mis­sion can be found at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity Applied Physics Lab­o­ra­tory. The site includes a handy ani­ma­tion tool with a sim­u­lated view of the instru­ment mea­sure­ments, images, ani­ma­tions, and more.

All the images pro­vided are a cour­tesy of NASA/Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Insti­tu­tion of Washington.

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