Messenger Sends First Full Fly-By Image of Mercury

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Gizmodo: "NASA's Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging spacecraft) has flown by just 125 miles over the surface of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest in the Solar System. This is the first time in history that the whole planet is going to be photographed in its entirety by an Earthling probe, with amazing resolution and ultra-crisp detail." The picture at the top of the linked story is fantastic, too.

Comments

RAEG

[Anonymous Coward]

>>the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest in the Solar System.

Anyone else rage?

Highly Reflective Craters

[Sibko]

Something I noticed immediately in the picture, was that the craters are a lot more reflective than what I typically see on, for instance, the moon. Certainly a lot more reflective than the rest of Mercury's surface.

Anyone have any idea why?

Colour images please

[4D6963]

And when the hell are we going to get coloured images of Mercury? I mean true RGB colours, not remapped colours. I know that Mercury's colours are probably not the most exciting thing ever, but damnit we have yet to see a single damn colour picture of that bloody planet and the Messenger guys are literally sitting on it.

That's my beef with this mission, all they're giving us is the few snapshots they can be bothered to give us, and that's it. And the best they can be bothered to do at updating the maps is this. It makes me mad. If they would just release their raw images like they did Cassini AND Huygens you're have fully updated real colour maps of Mercury all over the place.