Mercury Crater Close-Up

This Wide Angle Camera image was acquired 9 minutes and 14 seconds after MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury on its second flyby, when the spacecraft was moving at 6.1 kilometers/second (3.8 miles/second). The image, centered at about 2.4ºS, 290ºE, is one in a sequence of 55: a five-frame mosaic with each frame in the mosaic acquired in all 11 of the WAC filters. This portion of Mercury’s surface was previously imaged under different lighting conditions by Mariner 10, but this new MESSENGER image mosaic is the highest-resolution color imaging ever acquired of any portion of Mercury’s surface. Additionally, some of the images in this mosaic overlap with flyby data acquired by the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) and Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) instruments, resulting in the first time that these three instruments have gathered data of the same area of Mercury. The combination of these three datasets will enable unprecedented studies of this region of Mercury’s surface.