Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
Mercury’s finally getting its close-up. On 6 October, NASA’s Messenger probe flew within 200 kilometres of the planet’s surface. After this second of three flybys, the probe beamed data nuggets back to Earth. From them, astronomers are now processing some of the sharpest images ever taken of Mercury.
Getting the pictures is “a little bit like Christmas-time,” Messenger scientist Ralph McNutt of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland told New Scientist. And, mission scientists are now “in the process of opening a lot of the presents,” he said.
But, when the new data and images have been “digested and compared,” astronomers will for the first time have a global perspective of Mercury,” Messenger’s chief scientist, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, told BBC News. The images show regions of the planet that have only been seen in blurry Earth-based images, until now.
Mission scientists said that the most stunning new discovery from this flyby is the large pattern of stripes, called rays, appearing to extend from a young crater in the north to regions south of a crater called Kuiper, National Geographic reports.
During its encounter, Messenger also got the necessary gravitation tug to position the probe to swing past Mercury in September 2009 and zoom into the planet’s orbit in 2011.
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington