Messenger Mercury Photos Available

NASA's Messenger spacecraft, the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury, has taken tens of thousands of high resolution photos of the innermost planet of the Solar System.

These sharp photos reveal that bright patches, which were seen on the bottom of craters during a Messenger flyby, are actually irregularly shaped rimless pits that are often surrounded by high-reflecting materials. Brett Denevi of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory says that these pits seem to be relatively new and indicate the presence of large amounts of volatile materials in the crust of the planet.

In addition to taking photographs, Messenger is mapping Mercury's surface and its magnetic fields and is measuring the chemical composition of the surface.  NASA believes that this information will help provide scientists with information about the history of the Mercury and about the processes that are currently going on within it.

Messenger's Mercury Laser Altimeter has already made over two million observations of the northern hemisphere of Mercury, providing detailed information about geological features as well as the planet's overall shape.

The X-Ray Spectrometer on Messenger has revealed that Mercury has large amounts of sulfur on the surface. This observation provides support for previous suggestions that Mercury contains sulfide minerals. This knowledge could help scientists to understand how Mercury's volcanoes developed.

The Messenger spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury on March 18, 2011.