Date acquired: April 22, 2011
Image Mission Elapsed Time (MET): 211937510
Image ID: 161478
Instrument: Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
WAC filter: 7 (748 nanometers)
Center Latitude: 33.74°
Center Longitude: 240.5° E
Resolution: 725 meters/pixel
Scale: The edges of the image are about 362 km (226 mi.) long.
Incidence Angle: 60.3°
Emission Angle: 0.2°
Phase Angle: 60.2°

Of Interest: This image shows the nearly right-angle intersection of rays from Degas crater (to the west, off the left side of the image) and a ray from a crater far to the north. The diffuse bright portions of the rays contain clusters of secondary craters that formed when material ejected from the primary craters struck the surface. The raw image was binned on the spacecraft to 512 by 512 pixels.

This image was acquired as part of MDIS's color base map. The color base map is composed of WAC images taken through eight different narrow-band color filters and will cover more than 90% of Mercury's surface with an average resolution of 1 kilometer/pixel (0.6 miles/pixel). The highest-quality color images are obtained for Mercury's surface when both the spacecraft and the Sun are overhead, so these images typically are taken with viewing conditions of low incidence and emission angles.

The MESSENGER spacecraft is the first ever to orbit the planet Mercury, and the spacecraft's seven scientific instruments and radio science investigation are unraveling the history and evolution of the Solar System's innermost planet. Visit the Why Mercury? section of this website to learn more about the key science questions that the MESSENGER mission is addressing. During the one-year primary mission, MDIS is scheduled to acquire more than 75,000 images in support of MESSENGER's science goals.

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.