Date Acquired: October 6, 2008
Image Mission Elapsed Time (MET): 131772108
Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Resolution: 280 meters/pixel (0.17 miles)
Scale: This image is approximately 280 kilometers (170 miles) high
Spacecraft Altitude: 10,800 kilometers (6,700 miles)

Of Interest: This high-resolution NAC image shows a view of Mercury's dawn terminator, the division between the sunlit dayside and dark nightside of the planet, as seen as the MESSENGER spacecraft departed the planet during the mission's second Mercury flyby. This frame is just one of 195 images that make up the second NAC mosaic obtained following closest approach. A mosaic is a series of images that form a larger picture, in this case a high-resolution view of a portion of Mercury's northern hemisphere. This image is also just one of the 1287 total images acquired during Mercury flyby 2. Last week, all of the images (as well as data from MESSENGER's other instruments) collected during Mercury flyby 2 were made publicly available on NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) website, giving scientists around the world access to this exciting new dataset.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

For information regarding the use of MESSENGER images, see the image use policy.