(See description below)
Close-Up of Mercury
On January 14, 2008 the Messenger space probe took nine different views of Mercury, which were combined to create this mosaic of images in 3 rows and 3 columns.
Just above and to the left of center of this image is a small
crater with a pronounced set of bright rays extending across Mercury's surface
away from the crater. Bright rays are commonly made in a crater-forming
explosion when an asteroid strikes the surface of an airless body like the Moon
or Mercury. But rays fade with time as tiny meteoroids and particles from the
solar wind strike the surface and darken the rays. The prominence of these rays
implies that the small crater at the center of the ray pattern formed
comparatively recently.
The Wide Angle Camera used here is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters,
and each of the 9 different views was acquired through all 11 filters. This
image was taken in filter 7, which is sensitive to light near the red end of the
visible spectrum (750 nm), and shows features as small as about 6 kilometers (4
miles) in size. The MESSENGER team is studying this previously unseen side of
Mercury in detail to map and identify new geologic features and to construct the
planet’s geological history.