14 DAY TRIAL // Recent analyses conducted by the NASA MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft revealed that the surface of the innermost planet in our solar system is more colored than first anticipated.
What is interesting is that this diversity of colors is apparent both in true- and false-color images. These views were collected by different instruments aboard the spacecraft, yet they all suggest that this world is a lot more diverse than astronomers first gave it credit for.
Managed by the Applied Physics Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University, the mission launched from the SLC-17B pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, in Florida, on August 3, 2004.
For the next six and a half years, it traveled through the inner solar system, completing flybys of Earth (2005), Venus (2006, 2007) and Mercury (two in 2008 and one in 2009). It finally achieved orbital insertion around the latter on March 18, 2011.
During recent observation sessions, it used its Wide Angle Camera to collect a large number of images, which were then stitched together in this mosaic. The color code is 996 nanometers for red, 748 nanometers for green and 433 nanometers for blue.
The to far left of the image is the bright, rayed crater Debussy, named after the famous French composer. The Mercurial landscape feature is around 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide, experts say.
According to NASA investigators, the multitude of colors visible in the WAC mosaic is due to the diverse mineralogical composition of Mercurial regolith (soil). This is further demonstrated in the second image, which was collected by the Visual and Infrared Spectrograph (VIRS) instrument.
It basically represents a map of the planet's surface, but each color corresponds to a different mineral VIRS identified on Mercury. When this dataset was first compiled, scientists were baffled by what they saw. No one expected the planet to be so diverse.
Mercury is a hellish environment. It is tidally locked to the Sun – similar to how the Moon is to Earth – which means that it always keeps the same face oriented towards the star. Temperatures on the surface and it the atmosphere reach hundreds of degrees.
This is the main reason why no other spacecraft before MESSENGER was able to endure in orbit around this world. The NASA probe is the first artificial satellite Mercury ever had, Universe Today reports.
