Mercury Flyby 1 Options

[JRehling]

Mercury and the Moon have surface histories written with the same alphabet, but in different languages. At a glance, they're just alike, but then a couple of seconds into looking at a Mercury image, I start to see things that violate expectations I didn't consciously know I had.

I'm thinking of Mercury as being intermediate in thermal evolution between the Moon and Mars. Much closer to the Moon in that regard, and with no weathering, but there's just been a lot more lava flowing around Mercury since the early heavy bombardment.

[SpaceListener]

[attachment=13233:EN010882...rp_small.jpg]

That is a rather very good picture. The large, shadow-filled, double ringed crater to the upper right has another peculiar thing which are the rays of minicraters sprying outside and aslo I see a strange channels which connect two small craters at the lower left corner. Maybe this channel was formed by the falling action of a big rock soon after the big meteoro made the impact to Vivaldi crater.

Looking forward to see much more pictures specially in colored images. Hope it would be by february?

[elakdawalla]

Just for fun, the same area as seen by Mariner 10. Mosaic of two images, stretched vertically 200% to make the geometry look a bit more like the MESSENGER image. Click to enlarge.


--Emily

[JRehling]

[...]

[ngunn]

I've just realised why this view (the Vivaldi one) is somewhat disturbing to look at. It's because some of the craters aren't circular, and this messes up the normally unconscious process of 'reading' the perspective. For instance there is a smallish crater to the left of Vivaldi with a totally shadowed interior that looks almost like a circular black hole punched through the photograph. It just won't lie down on the surface of the planet when I look at it. In fact it must be considerably elongated along the line of sight to look circular in the image, but no matter how much I tell myself this it still looks . . . disturbing. I think this is going to be a characteristic of Mercury images in general. Looking forward to some 3D - THAT should make the surface behave properly!

[dilo]

Vivaldi's picture with corrected black (without the grey halo in the lower half of image), adjusted luminosity/contrast and sharpened:

Note the weak rim now visible inside the internal one...

[tedstryk]

Here is a comparison with a distant view and the new global view. There are a few features that are beyond the terminator in the Mariner-10 closeups. That large crater at the center of Caloris may well be a great drill down into Mercury.

I also attached the Mariner-10 image at a more reasonable side.

[jsheff]

I think a really beautiful final image product will be an albedo map of Mercury laid on top of a shaded bump map so the albedo and terrain are both apparent simultaneously (the two seem never to co-occur in any real images of Mercury). An even more compelling ingredient for such a map might turn up when we see what kind of spectral variety exists.

Quite so. When you consider the history of Mars observation, we've had centuries of Earth-based mapping of albedo features. When up-close imaging became available, it turned out there was almost no correlation between albedo features and the geological ground truth. (Thaty's not to imply the albedo maps were useless, though!) It will be interesting to see if the same will hold for Mercury ...
- John Sheff
Cambridge, MA

[peter59]

I'm a little dissapointed. I don't know what is wrong, but first NAC image faintly looks like newspaper print. Please don't critic me too harshly, but it's my impression. WAC image is fantastic.

[OWW]

are you gonna tell me THIS looks like newspaper?

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/scienc...0108826105M.png

WOW. WOW.

[ugordan]

Or this???

Check out what look like streams and streams of secondary craters!

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Indeed

[Astro0]

OK, a big sorry for my posts yesterday. I was up for 20 hours yesterday and 18 hours the day before on the Messenger encounter and other stuff. As I was putting a few messages on UMSF, I must have been delirious with the data rate stuff.

To clarify, it is kilobits but per second (not per hour). I was told that the inital link data rate was 25-30kilobits per second and passed that on as 'per hour' - - my bad.

During downlink of the actual data we get a top rate of 104,166kb/s.
Our coverage was from 0020-0720 UTC, so 7 hours of actual data downlink at nearly the top rate the entire pass.
There was a 5 minute period where we were unable to get clean data due to a brief but severe storm.

I hope that makes more sense. Glad I got some sleep last night.
Looks like there might be a few more late nights though browsing through all these great images coming online.

(sleepy) Astro0

[ugordan]

Here's context for that crater image (was rotated 180 deg and contrast-enhanced):



EDIT: Added both new images.

In the leftmost image in the above composite, notice how everywhere where the shadows are long, their edge is noticeably diffuse. No doubt a testament to the large angular size of the Sun there (3x as large as seen from Earth). I'm not sure you can see this in images of the Moon.

[Phil Stooke]

Thanks, ugordan! I think we can see from this that the images of the interior of Caloris at this resolution are going to be spectacular, high sun or not.

Phil