MESSENGER Gets Up Close and Personal With Mercury
Mercury’s ready for its close-up, Mr. MESSENGER! At an incredible 5 meters per pixel, the image above is one of the highest-resolution images of Mercury’s surface ever captured. It was acquired on March 15 with the MESSENGER spacecraft’s MDIS (Mercury Dual Imaging System) instrument and shows an 8.3-km (5.2-mile) -wide section of the planet’s north polar region, speckled with small craters and softly rolling hills.
And, with a new low-altitude mission ahead, there’ll be plenty more like this — and likely even better — in the months ahead. Read the rest of this article here.
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Posted on May 16, 2014, in Mercury and tagged craters, high resolution, Mercury, Messenger, planet, solar system, space, surface. Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on MESSENGER Gets Up Close and Personal With Mercury.