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Color Mosaic Of The Eastern Limb Of Mercury

This image acquired during a January 2008 flyby--the colors of which are not those that would be seen by the human eye but instead convey information about the distribution of different rock types on Mercury's surface--is just a taste of things to come when MESSENGER becomes the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury in 2011.
Color mosaic of the eastern limb of Mercury as seen by MESSENGERCredit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington