Presented at: A press conference held at the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, USA. In total, MESSENGER team members are presenting 57 papers at this conference.
Instrument: Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)

Of Interest: The highest-resolution radar image of Mercury's north polar region made from the Arecibo Observatory (Harmon et al., Icarus, 211, 37-50, 2011) is shown in yellow on a mosaic of MESSENGER orbital images. Radar-bright features in the Arecibo image all collocate with areas mapped as in shadow in Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) images to date, consistent with the proposal that radar-bright materials contain water ice. This image is shown in a polar stereographic projection with every 5° of latitude and 30° of longitude indicated and with 0° longitude at the bottom. On Mercury, 5° of latitude is approximately 213 km.

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 acquired 88,746 images and extensive other data sets. MESSENGER is now in a yearlong extended mission, during which plans call for the acquisition of more than 80,000 additional images to support 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.