Gallery | My Favorite Planet Pics | Mercury
Even through the best telescopes on Earth, the closest planet to the Sun is a bit blurry. Because it never strays far from our central star, Mercury is always low to the horizon at twilight and difficult to observe. That's why NASA sent the MESSENGER probe to the smallest planet: to get close-up images and take all sorts of data which will help us understand this hot, dense world.
MESSENGER is doing a series of gravitational loop-de-loops to get to Mercury, and has passed the planet three times already. In October 2008, during its second flyby, it took this astonishing picture. It shows two prominent fresh craters on the airless planet, but also a series of vast, world-spanning rays: plumes of material ejected from an impact. Their existence had been inferred from earlier observations, but this was the first time they had been directly seen. We'll learn a whole lot more about Mercury when MESSENGER finally settles into orbit in March 2011.
Related post: Watermelon Planet
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
MESSENGER is doing a series of gravitational loop-de-loops to get to Mercury, and has passed the planet three times already. In October 2008, during its second flyby, it took this astonishing picture. It shows two prominent fresh craters on the airless planet, but also a series of vast, world-spanning rays: plumes of material ejected from an impact. Their existence had been inferred from earlier observations, but this was the first time they had been directly seen. We'll learn a whole lot more about Mercury when MESSENGER finally settles into orbit in March 2011.
Related post: Watermelon Planet
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
