Mercury Comes into View
After a six-and-a-half-year and 93-million-mile journey the Messenger spacecraft has reached its target — Mercury, the planet closest to the sun.
After a tricky maneuver to use gravitational force to enter into the fast-spinning orbit of Mercury the probe began sending back the clearest and closest pictures of the little planet.
Messenger now begins a one-year mission of snapping about 75,000 pictures of Mercury’s surface, which is hot enough to melt iron but may contain ice in permanently shadowed craters that dot its exterior.
The only other time we’ve seen images from Mercury was 30 years ago, when another probe — Mariner — did a brief flyby. Then only blurry, low-resolution pictures captured a tiny bit of the planet’s surface.
Messenger’s second look at the first planet from the sun will be much more detailed and give scientists a treasure trove of new information to better understand Mercury and other planets in our solar system and beyond.
“We are already seeing Mercury with a new eyes and with eight sets of eyes.” — Eric Finnegan, Applied Physics Lab, John Hopkins University
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