New to science: Striking images of Mercury's unseen side reveal a dramatic system of globe-straddling rays.
Credit: NASA
WASHINGTON DC: Yesterday, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft flew past Mercury and photographed a broad swath of never-before-seen terrain. The first of more than 1,200 high-resolution images are now arriving back at Earth.
"The MESSENGER team is extremely pleased by the superb performance of the spacecraft and the payload," said Sean Solomon, MESSENGER lead scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC.
"We are now on the correct trajectory for eventual insertion into orbit around Mercury, and all of our instruments returned data as planned," he said.
Striking patterns
This spectacular image (right), one of the first to be returned, was snapped by the spacecraft's Wide Angle Camera (WAC) about 90 minutes after MESSENGER's closest approach to Mercury, when the spacecraft was at a distance of about 27,000 km.
The most striking characteristic of this newly imaged area is the large pattern of lines streaking downward from the planet's northern regions.
The ray system appears to emanate from a relatively young crater previously seen in Earth-based radar images but photographed in detail by a spacecraft for the very first time just yesterday.
This view of the planet is distinctly unique from what MESSENGER saw during its first flyby in January this year.
Stream of images
In the mid-1970s when Mariner 10 flew past Mercury three times, the probe imaged less than half the planet. MESSENGER's first flyby in January of this year covered another 20 per cent of the planet's surface.
Yesterday, the probe successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury, unveiling an additional 30 per cent of the planet's surface that had never before been seen by spacecraft.
"When these data have been digested and compared, we will have a global perspective of Mercury for the first time," said Solomon.
Data from the flyby continue to stream down to Earth, including higher resolution close-up images of this previously unseen terrain.
