Slashdot Mirror
Mercury Turns Out To Be a Weird Little World
sighted writes "The robotic spacecraft MESSENGER, now orbiting the first planet, has found new findings odd features on its surface, including unexplained, blueish 'hollows' that may be actively forming today. The findings will be published this week in Science. One scientist said, 'The conventional wisdom was that Mercury is just like the Moon. But from its vantage point in orbit, MESSENGER is showing us that Mercury is radically different from the Moon in just about every way we can measure.'" As you might expect, National Geographic has beautiful imagery to go along with the story.
I'm pretty sure the blue color is false color showing height, as the image caption reads: "A colorized MESSENGER picture shows hollows (blue) in the Raditladi impact basin on Mercury."
it's almost impossible to take an image on another planet and accurately render it.
No harder than it is to do the same with an image from our own planet.