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.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Global Mosaic of Mercury

Normally, I try to stick to Io and the Jupiter system on this blog, but occasionally I do pay attention to what else is going on in the unmanned spaceflight community beyond Cassini/the Saturn system and the Jupiter system. Last week, the MESSENGER spacecraft performed its last of three flybys of the planet Mercury before it will go into orbit around the planet in 2011. In response to this flyby, I finally decided to piece together one of the global mosaics from last year's encounter, which covered similar territory... -- The Gish Bar Times

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW/Jason Perry