MESSENGER's First Orbital Images of Mercury

"The entire MESSENGER team is thrilled that spacecraft and instrument checkout has been proceeding according to plan," says MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "The first images from orbit and the first measurements from MESSENGER's other payload instruments are only the opening trickle of the flood of new information that we can expect over the coming year. The orbital exploration of the Solar System's innermost planet has begun." (5 images total):

The first image acquired by MESSENGER from orbit around Mercury was actually part of an eight-image sequence, for which images were acquired through eight of the WAC's eleven filters. Here we see a color version of that first imaged terrain.

his is the first image of Mercury taken from orbit with MESSENGER's Narrow Angle Camera (NAC). MESSENGER's camera system, the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), has two cameras: the Narrow Angle Camera and the Wide Angle Camera (WAC). At 1.5 degrees, the field of view of the NAC is seven times smaller than the 10.5 degree field of view of the WAC.

The image on the left shows a a beautiful example of a relatively small, simple, fresh impact feature on Mercury. The image on the right has never been seen before. This newly seen terrain shows craters with long shadows, as expected at this high northern latitude.

MESSENGER acquired this image of Mercury's horizon as the spacecraft was moving northward along the first orbit during which MDIS was turned on. Bright rays from Hokusai can be seen running north to south in the image. Now that MESSENGER is in orbit about Mercury, views of Mercury's horizon in the images will be much less common. The field of view will generally be filled with Mercury's surface as the instrument maps out the planet's geology in high resolution, stereo, and color

• More on Mercury
• MESSENGER in Brief
• MESSNENGER Mission Homepage (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)