E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
NASA / JHUAPL / CIW
The first image sent back to Earth from Mercury orbit shows a rayed crater known as Debussy and a smaller crater with unusual dark rays, called Matabei. The picture was transmitted to Earth by NASA's Messenger spacecraft.
Last updated 3:40 p.m. ET March 30:
NASA's Messenger mission unveiled the first picture of the planet Mercury taken by an orbiting spacecraft on Tuesday, and promised to provide more goodies in the days and months to come.
The picture shows a wide region of Mercury's southern hemisphere, including the south pole and a wedge of the planet that has never been photographed close-up before. But you'd probably be forgiven if you wondered whether the Messenger probe was orbiting the moon rather than Mercury: The monochromatic, heavily cratered terrain looks a lot like the lunar surface.
Here's a description of the scene from Messenger's science team:
"The dominant rayed crater in the upper portion of the image is Debussy. The smaller crater Matabei with its unusual dark rays is visible to the west of Debussy. The bottom portion of this image is near Mercury's south pole and includes a region of Mercury's surface not previously seen by spacecraft. Compare this image to the planned image footprint [displayed below] to see the region of newly imaged terrain, south of Debussy."
NASA / JHUAPL / CIW
The yellow square on this mosaic image shows the planned footprint for the first image to be acquired by a spacecraft orbiting Mercury. The dark area represents a region of the planet that has not previously been seen by spacecraft.
Messenger's science team is already familiar with most of Mercury's terrain. The $446 million mission got under way in 2004, and the desk-sized probe zoomed past Mercury in 2008 (twice!) and in 2009. At its closest, Messenger came within 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the surface, which is much closer than the distance from which today's picture was taken (about 9,500 miles or 15,000 kilometers).
But Messenger (whose name comes from the acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) wasn't in orbit back then. It was just passing through. The probe finally entered orbit around Mercury on March 17 and is now going through its commissioning phase.
The Messenger mission's principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in a news release that he and his colleagues were "thrilled that the spacecraft and instrument checkout has been proceeding according to plan":
"The first images from orbit and the first measurements from Messenger's other payload instruments are only the opening trickle of the flood of new information that we can expect over the coming year. The orbital exploration of the solar system’s innermost planet has begun."
Today's picture, snapped at 5:20 a.m. ET, was the first of 364 images that were acquired during a span of six hours and sent back to Earth, Messenger's mission team said. More than 1,000 images are due to be taken during the probe's checkout. During Messenger's yearlong science campaign, more than 75,000 pictures are to be sent back.
Mercury has been studied during flybys before, most notably by Mariner 10 in 1974-75, but Messenger is the first spacecraft to orbit the solar system's innermost planet. It's also the densest planet, as well as the planet with the largest daily variations in surface temperature.
Just how big is Mercury's metal-rich core? Do deep, permanently shadowed craters at the planet's poles contain ice? What does its atmosphere (or "exosphere") contain? Why does Mercury have a global magnetic field, while Venus and Mars do not? Messenger's team plans to address all those questions in the year ahead. Some of them may even be addressed on Wednesday, when team leaders are due to discuss Messenger's first images at 2 p.m. ET during a NASA teleconference. Stay tuned for updates after the scientists have had their say.
Update for 3:40 p.m. March 30: Still more pictures were released on Wednesday, as promised. Check out this Photoblog gallery featuring three of the best images, and check back later for still more about the successful start of Messenger's orbital mission.
More about Mercury:
- 10 surprising facts about Messenger
- Is Mercury an incredible shrinking planet?
- Mercury just might hit us someday
- Interactive: The new solar system
Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." And if you want to stay on my good side, don't ever call Mercury the "smallest planet."
Leave a Comment:
WOW guys thats incredible! So we have much to learn of this innermost planet. Let the education process begin!
What an incredible short sighted waste of money that could have been spent investigating more important facets of the solar system. I would rather have saved the money it cost to go to Mercury which looks an awful lot like our moon and sent a robotic probe to either Titan or Europa. If our ultimate goal is to find life outside our own planet then we should be focused on the outer moons. We suppose that their is a massive ocean on one of these moons and yet we don't seem to be to anxious to get there and find out, why?
Shortsighted? On the contrary, exploration of our solar system and beyond will require resources to do so, and where better to gather those resources than a lifeless, low gravity metal rich little planet? Mercury has a lot more potential than most people realize in helping build our future.
The mission costs were $400 million, I can grantee that the additional cost of that probe exceeds that, space technology is not cheap.
Then there is one fact we all understand about Mercury, it's very close to the Sun and will never be explored by a human. I have to agree with SNAPPA on this one, Mars is the next destination and then Jupiter's Moons.
Wow guys thats amazing! We have so much to learn of this innermost planet. Now the education can begin in ernest. Congratulations to all who made this possible. Remarkable photo. Great work.
I have been waiting for this kind of info since I first read about the orbital insertion. I feel like a little kid, giddy with excitment over this. I can't wait for more information.
I am enjoying the dickens out of this! Those pictures are beautiful. I wonder how long it will be before some goofball proposes that the blackened out area in the second photo is blacked out to hide an alien base? Sorry, couldn't help myself. Waiting for more great photos!!!
Actually, I wanna go to Mercury, too!
Nonsense. Everyone knows the Anunaki built their base on the far side of the Moon...
I think some one all made that statement, What was it you call him?
Well done Messenger and team!
Looking forward to the findings from Mercury while waiting for the info from Pluto.
I was thrilled to be at JPL during the very first flyby nearly 40 years ago, and used the knowledge and iomages to enrich classes for years. Congratulations, and good luck. I'll continue to watch and learn, even if I'm retired from teaching astronomy now.
Another great scientific leap by America! It feels like so long ago that messenger left, had not been able to shake the feeling that if just popped a desk sized zinger up, the sun and a little bit of ion engine would of put the thing there in a matter of days...70 years into the space program, we now know that we can't just emulate those 50's sci-fi b movies...yet...glad it is finally there and on THE JOB!!...hat's off to the worlds best engineers, NASA!!!
The comment about the likeness of the moon rings so true, makes me wonder what nearby planet could of possibly of lost it's moon to tidal gravitational forces emanating from the sun, jeesh, the current orbit would almost likely take the wanderer moon toward it's once former orbit, almost like it does to venus....hmmmm....surely the planet missing it's moon would be rotating a lot slower with out it's once balanced outer momentum weight to tug it around...wonder what planet mighta lost a moon..should be obvious without one right now, all the other planets have moons...hmmm....gotta keep thinking about that...hard to say without a manned mission to merc, or at least a humunoid robot with a new fangled sense called TELEPRESENCE....in HD EVEN!!...gosh, wonder who might be capable of doing that...let's see, congress..naw, no lobbyists interested in mining oil on merc, and none of them can spell helium three....hmmm...green people?...naw, everyone knows green houses won't do well on merc, too much sunlight....hmmm....NASA, surely not with all the budget cuts..too bad there is not a renegrade group of scientists and engineers working for a large space organization scraping together parts from salvage and hardware shelves and building a robot with a crazy goal of setting it on the moon in like a thousand days or something...yea, those are the kinda guys we need, I bet they would call their project something like project M or something...I bet they could do it, gee, maybe someone out there knows of such a group and might even drop them an email...sure would be cool.....but don't tell no senators or congressmen...and expexially no presidents, they don't like people that can do things right and off the cuff, scares 'em cause without control they could very well get thier pictures in the paper without it being scheduled by a campaign manager....and we all know that ain't good.
WAY TO GO MESSENGER TEAM!!. I am betting the planet has a molten core, a slight nitrogen atmosphere, a trace of methane from a very thin layer of "unknown" right below the surface and a really twisted magnetic field that has allowed some of the strangest minerals ever to form!!..Win or lose, I am willing to help project M any way that I can, I am easy enough to find through google (name + equipment) and sometimes call out as N3TWU.
Ray, Thanks for the laughs!!! And hats off!! to the Messenger Team!! wtg! Here's a thought, If mercury is so metal rich, what if we could divert it's orbit to out by us? mining/ space base?
Alan, the name wasn't derived from the acronym, the acronym was derived from the name. The need to justify names by reverse engineering mostly senseless acronyms is just another indicator of human superficiality.
Hello America, Mercury Mission another offspring of German Science, I'm asking Munich to please shut such things down for now! well the last reports are that the damaged reactors are leaking over 3000 rads per hour, lethal, this makes me sooooooo angry, who is to blame for this world wide disaster?, GE of course, Los Alamos certainly, but by far and for most are the Irresponsible German Scientist that turned over this highly tachnical science to the World body of Acadamia in General, any Joe Jack that wanted to learn about E=mc^2 were given license, so the real blame lies with Albert Eistein, Oppenheimer, Max Planck, Shroedinger, Von Braun, and all others From Munich that felt that they were obligated to bring to the World all this wonderful German Science, Nuclear Energy, Jet Planes, Rocket Science Etc. Etc. Etc. theirs was a care free attitude with such critical knowledge and just what are the results of such knowledge given so freely? now look what they have left the world, Radioactive for 10,000 years, Einstein should have never given Truman the Bomb, if Einstein felt detached from Germany because of the Hitler Regime, he could have at least have left his German Science behind him when he left Germany he should have simply taken up Potatoe farming, none of this should have been given to the World, they are not now ready or any time in the immediate future ready for these type of experiments, far better if they had allowed the Amish approach to supending the world in the 17th century life style, bicycles and goat carts could not leave behind such devistation, well what can be done? we cannot go back once they allowed these Asian, Japanese, Chinese, and Muslim people to get ahold of German Science it is difficult to undo, they are very clever people all they needed was to be shown how to do it, its always easiest after being shown how, , now I suggest Closing the Borders in Germany and the European Union, and driving all these wanna be, muslim science students out of europe, little can be done here in the U.S. all we can do is to limit, serverly Limit any further correspondence with these U.S. Universities on Scientific matters, and perhaps with time with the help of the Grand Unification Laws all this evil can be undone, I have warned Munich but they don't to listen to Fezzy Bear, sincerely Fezzy Bear
There's always a luddite isn't there....:(
What an amazing time we live in. Certainly we have to endure horrific calamities such as the problems the Japanese are going through and uprisings such as Libya but look what amazing things we are privileged to see. We have enjoyed up close looks at Saturn and Mercury from orbit not to mention actual views of the Mars surface. There has never been a group of people who enjoyed such wonders. We have seen men walk on the Moon and return to tell of its wonders. We have also seen the depths of our oceans, discovering lost ships from centuries old disasters. What a great time to live.
More info to make the Religious Community nervous.
I used to drive a Mercury.
He eats Cadillacs, Lincoln's too. Mercury's and Subaru.
Those who talk about the wastefulness of spending on space exploration are fools. Lewis and Clark would not have given us a snapshot of this America without government funding and we might have let Mexico, Russia, etc. keep their damn land, like Texas and Alaska!