NASA's Maps Reveal Mercury's Unique Landscape

By R. Siva Kumar - 10 May '16 15:19PM

NASA's MESSENGER mission orbited Mercury for four years. It has released a new digital model of the planet showing its unique landscape, even as other maps reveal more features of the planet, such as its north pole that is shadowed.

"The wealth of these data, greatly enhanced by the extension of MESSENGER's primary one-year orbital mission to more than four years, has already enabled and will continue to enable exciting scientific discoveries about Mercury for decades to come," said Susan Ensor, manager of the MESSENGER Science Operations Center.

The first of its kind global digital-elevation model (DEM) of Mercury, was created from more than 10,000 images shot by the spacecraft. It enables viewers to get close-up looks at the plains and spaces of the tiny planet.

NASA released another Mercury map showing its northern poles. They have long shadows as the sun rests low in the area. The MESSENGER also shows earlier volcanic activity in the northern region under lava, which is a mile deep.

MESSENGER's Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) enabled the filters to minimize shadows and show the volcanic plains lining the northern landscape, which helped the scientists to create the map.

"This has become one of my favorite maps of Mercury," said Nancy Chabot, a MDIS Instrument Scientist from John Hopkins University. "Now that it is available, I'm looking forward to it being used to investigate this epic volcanic event that shaped Mercury's surface."

Last April, the MESSENGER's mission got over, which led to its destruction, as it crashed into the planet. Yet the information from its travels, including the Mercury maps, will give an insight into space issues for a long time.

"During its four years of orbital observations, MESSENGER revealed the global characteristics of one of our closest planetary neighbors for the first time," said Sean Solomon, the MESSENGER mission's principal investigator. "MESSENGER's scientists and engineers hope that data from the mission will continue to be utilized by the planetary science community for years to come, not only to study the nature of the innermost planet, but [also] to address broader questions about the formation and evolution of the inner solar system more generally."