Mercury in black and white and a false-colour image
Mercury in black and white and a false-colour image
After three flybys by NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft in 1973 and 1974, the NASA Discovery-class mission MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) became the only mission to observe the innermost planet of the Solar System from orbit. After the first Mercury solar day (176 Earth days) in orbit, MESSENGER had almost completed two of its most important global mapping campaigns: a monochrome map with a resolution of 250 metres per pixel (left) and an eight-colour colour map with a resolution of one kilometre per pixel (right). The orthographic views shown here, centred at 75° east longitude, are each mosaics of thousands of individual images. The image on the right is composed of wide-angle camera images at wavelengths of 1000, 750 and 430 nanometres.
