http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php?id=141
NASA’s MESSENGER mission team and cartographic experts from the U. S. Geological Survey have created a critical tool for planning the first orbital observations of the planet Mercury – a global mosaic of the planet that will help scientists pinpoint craters, faults, and other features for observation...
You can explore the map in http://www.mapaplanet.org/ (which seems to have been redesigned a bit), or download the full resolution version at 500 m/pixel http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Messenger/. That page also has some interesting info on the map's precision:
cool i can update my map .
i did, a bit lo contrast and still needs some work
http://www.imagebam.com/image/bb164773393055/ http://www.imagebam.com/image/f2f41c73393056/ http://www.imagebam.com/image/2c334573393057/ http://www.imagebam.com/image/a0c0c773393058/ http://www.imagebam.com/image/cbbbd773393059/
Looks like a nice high resolution map there on the USGS site. Perhaps though the "ultimate" map would still have some color information as well as ground based radar data added. Some seams are still there as well - perhaps more of an art vs science consideration? John's version appears to have dealt with this a bit.
scalbers
i do a bit of air brushing to remove seams
a link to a screen shot
http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/images/screenshots/various/mercury_VT_Mercury_Surface_Map_2__John_van_Vliet.jpg
http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=1069
the third shot on that page is not mine
my map but a very,very old hand drawn bump map ( mariner) , that dose NOT line up with the new maps
Messenger team released yesterday a new mosaic:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=396
I prepare desktop wallpaper (1280 x 1024) (image was reduced, sharpened and contrasted).
Google Mercury coming soon?
VERY nice desktop, Peter, just put it up! Thank you!
3 new mosaics released.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/
Wow !
I've always been mystified at how similar Mercury looks to our own moon. Out of curiosity, have any papers ever discussed the possibility of Mercury being a former moon of Venus, or would that be an impossibility in some way?
Mercury and our Moon are very different on the inside. Mercury has a much higher density, in fact it's denser than Venus despite being much smaller.
Mercury is almost as dense as the Earth, despite being much smaller as well, yes. I just thought it was odd that I had never read anywhere about the possibility of Mercury being a former moon of Venus, a result of a giant impact similar to Earth, even from crackpot journalists.
Thanks Tom, I really appreciate that. I scoured the net for probably 2 hours straight last night, baffled that I was coming up empty handed.
Small, rocky, no atmosphere - why would you expect them to be substantially different in appearance? On a similar note, what about Vesta? Excluding features resulting from the impact that created a structure nearly as big in diameter as Vesta itself, would you expect it to look much different?
Maybe mystified was a poor word choice; maybe interesting would be better. There are few, really large rocky bodies to compare and all of them have somewhat unique characteristics. As for Vesta, looking at Hubble images, I'm not at all sure what it would look like up close, but possibly somewhat similar.
Greetings,
Here is an updated version of my global map with several improvements, including the addition of ugordan's flyby 1 outbound mosiac.
Great work! Can we expect more updates in the future?
Excellent!
New Hermean texture for Orbiter simulator.
Am i seeing things or is there an anaglyph at -60 S and - 60 w
[attachment=25670:ana.jpg]
Good eye John - would be nice to have a 3-D map though
My latest version (linked in signature below) should have fewer of this type of artifact. It is also now 8K in size so finer details can be seen.
Not to leave the north pole out... this is a mosaic showing the region not yet seen in published images. The outer edge is 45 north. It takes a while to fill in the north because the images cover a lot less ground.
Phil
Phil, your mosaic may contain the answer to a question I was just asking myself this morning...have any images yet been released to the PDS that include the flow and scour features identified in Head et al.'s paper about the north polar lava flows?
Here's the diagram from their paper. It was released at very low resolution, and I asked if there were plans to release it at higher resolution, and they said not until a paper yet to be submitted to (I think) Icarus was published.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14848
--Emily
If you look closely you will see that area at about the 2:00 position, out near the edge of my map.
I think the images from that paper are not yet released, but the feature was seen with low resolution and higher sun during one of the flybys.
Phil
If you go to the MESSENGER Quickmap:
http://messenger-act.actgate.com/msgr_public_released/react_quickmap.html
... and zoom in on 59 north, 110 east (NW of Caloris), you can see the area.
Phil
Huh, so you can. Thanks.
The latest MESSENGER picture of the day is a global (or almost so) mosaic, very nice. I expect it to be incorporated into Quickmap eventually, so it can be zoomed into more than the current release allows.
Phil
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=681
This is the north polar region (out to about 45 degrees) from that mosaic.
Phil
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