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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."
The images you're referring to are enhanced (stretched) color, not false color. According to the official release, the hollows are "very bright and have a blue color relative to other areas of Mercury." As one image caption from NASA explains, "the enhanced-color locator image emphasizes the high reflectance and relatively blue color."
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
A little higher res and we will be able to make out the blue string soup
It would have been great if on one of these planets we saw something moving around ... sure would be a kick in the ol' Space Program, then, eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
PS anyone else ever get annoyed by how Wikipedia is inconsistent in how it lists statistics for planetary bodies? Drives me nuts when trying to make comparisons, or even just get useful information.
Yeah. I wish there was a way to change that.
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.