Date Acquired: September 25, 2009
Image Mission Elapsed Time (MET): 162359963
Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Resolution: 33 kilometers/pixel (21 miles/pixel)
Scale: Mercury's diameter is 4880 kilometers (3030 miles)
Spacecraft Altitude: 1,300,000 kilometers (810,000 miles)
Of Interest: With four days remaining until
MESSENGER's third flyby of Mercury, MDIS captured this NAC image of the approaching planet. Mercury appears as a sunlit crescent, and the MESSENGER spacecraft is quickly approaching at a speed of approximately 3.3 kilometers/second (7,400 miles/hour)! View
this animation to watch the many instrument observations planned for the upcoming encounter next week.
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.