Mercury in color
DOI: 10.1063/1.2897962
On 14 January 2008, the MESSENGER spacecraft passed within 200 km of Mercury during the first of its three flybys before the spacecraft settles into orbit around the innermost planet in March 2011. MESSENGER’s visit was the first to Mercury since Mariner 10’s three flybys in 1974–75. In addition to adjusting course to put MESSENGER in position for its 2011 rendezvous, the January flyby provided an opportunity to study the planet with the craft’s seven onboard instruments. In particular, MESSENGER captured images of large, previously unseen parts of the planet.
MESSENGER’s wide-angle camera is equipped with 11 narrowband color filters. This color image, taken 80 minutes before the spacecraft’s closest approach, is a combination of three separate images, at wavelengths of 1000, 700, and 430 nanometers (in the near-IR, red, and violet) and colored red, green, and blue, respectively. The colors displayed here are thus somewhat different from what would be seen directly with the human eye. The false-color image accentuates color differences and provides information about the planet’s minerals and rock types, knowledge that will be used to investigate Mercury’s formation and structure.
To submit candidate images for Back Scatter, visit http://www.physicstoday.org/backscatter.html .
(Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.)
