This crater on Mercury has been named for John Lennon.
Disney should have bought the naming rights.
Image Credit: NASA
A Crater on Mercury
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Tag Archives: Mercury
A Flyby of Mercury
The ESA /JAXA BepiColumbo spacecraft took this picture of Mercury as it flew by the planet during a braking maneuver last month.
Image Credit: ESA / JAXA
A Gravity Assist From Mercury
The ESA Bepi-Columbo spacecraft just made its second gravity assist flyby of Mercury. It will make four more flybys of the planet before a final set of maneuvers will release an orbiter in 2025. The orbiter will conduct science operation around Mercury until 2027 or 2028.
Video Credit: ESA
Mercury and the Solar Wind
Video Credit: NASA
Flying By Mercury
The ESA/JAXA BepiColumbo spacecraft took these pictures of Mercury during its first gravity assist flyby of the planet. During its seven-year cruise to the innermost planet of the Solar System, BepiColombo makes one flyby at Earth, two at Venus and six at Mercury. It will finally arrive in orbit around Mercury in 2025.
Video Credit: ESA / JAXA
Encountering Venus
This sequence of 89 images was taken by the monitoring cameras on board the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury during its second Venus flyby.
Video Credit: ESA
C is for Crater
The MESSEGER spacecraft took this picture of a crater on Mercury.
Behold—the Cookie Monster crater!
Image Credit: NASA
Transit of Mercury
Between 1200 and 1808 UTC (7:00 am to 1:38pm ET) yesterday, the Solar Dynamics Observatory watched as Mercury move across the face of the Sun. SDO views the Sun in several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light.
Video Credit: NASA
Mercury
This video is a compilation of thousands of images taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft of Mercury. It’s rendered in exaggerated colors to highlight different surface features. Rays emanating from a northern impact that stretch across much of the planet, and about half-way through the video, the light colored Caloris Basin, a northern ancient impact feature that filled with lava, rotates into view. Recent analysis of MESSENGER data indicates that Mercury has a solid inner core.\
Video Credits: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Carnegie Institution of Washington
Going Back to Mercury
Video Credit: ESA
Mercury Visualized from MESSENGER
Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / CIW
Processing: Roman Tkachenko
A Valley on Mercury
This animation of a 3-D perspective view of Mercury’s great valley was constructed from an image mosaic taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft. The image mosaic transforms into a colorized digital elevation model created from stereo images of the region.
Video Credit: NASA
Another View of the Transit of Mercury
NASA had several satellites monitoring the transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun last week. This video superimposes closeups taken by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrometer satellite over a view of the Sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Video Credit: NASA
A Global Map of Mercury
Video Credit: USGS
The 2016 Transit of Mercury
Video Credit: NASA
Five Planets
From now until around Feb. 20, pre-dawn stargazers will stand a good chance of seeing all five planets known to ancient astronomers simultaneously: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter. Those planets should be visible to the naked eye, but a pair of binoculars may be necessary to pull Mercury out of the pre-dawn sky glow from the Sun.
Jupiter will rise in the evening, then Mars will come over the horizon after midnight, followed by Saturn, then Venus, and Mercury just before dawn. All five should be visible from southeast to southwest between 6:00 and 6:30 am local time.
Image Credit: NASA
This Isn’t the Moon
It’s Mercury. The MESSENGER spacecraft captured images used to make this video during a flyover of the planet’s north pole on 8 June, 2014. The images were taken once per second while the spacecraft was at altitudes ranging from 115 to 165 km, traveling at a speed of 3.7 km/s relative to the surface. The frame rate has been sped up by a factor of seven for ease of viewing. The images have resolutions ranging from 21 to 45 m/pixel.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSOv0-iWWwQ]Video Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Carnegie Institution of Washington
BTW, MESSENGER was launched ten years ago today.
Transit of Mercury … As Seen from Mars
Video Credit: NASA
Hollows on Mercury
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqg8PR2mVvc]
Video Credit: NASA
A Day on Mercury
This animation shows wide-angle camera images of Mercury’s south polar region taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft over one complete Mercury solar day (176 Earth days). This dataset enabled the illumination conditions at Mercury’s south polar region to be quantified, producing the map seen at the end of the movie and provided as a separate image. The map is colored on the basis of the percentage of time that a given area is sunlit; areas appearing black in the map are regions of permanent shadow. The large crater near Mercuryâs south pole, Chao Meng-Fu, has a diameter of 180 km.
Video Credit: NASA
John Lennon on Mercury
This crater on Mercury has been named for John Lennon.
Disney should have bought the naming rights.
Image Credit: NASA
Look on the Sunny Side
This view of Mercury’s horizon was taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft in orbit around the planet. It was acquired looking from the shadows toward the sunlit side of the planet.A 120-km impact crater stands out near the center. The crater has several chains of secondary craters which gouge linear tracks radially away from it. While this crater does not appear to be of recent origin (its rays have faded), its secondary crater chains are more prominent than most similar craters.
Once per week, MESSENGER captures images of Mercury’s limb, with an emphasis on imaging the southern hemisphere limb. These limb images provide information about Mercury’s shape and complement measurements of topography made by the spacecraft’s laser altimeter of Mercury’s northern hemisphere.
Image Credit: NASA
An Elliptical Crater
Most craters are more or less circular. This is Hovnatanian crater on Mercury, named for Armenian painter Hakop Hovnatanian. The crater’s elliptical shape and the bright rays’ butterfly pattern indicate the whatever hit the planet causing the crater came in at a very shallow angle. The brightness of the rays indicates that they are relatively young features on Mercury’s surface.
This image was acquired by the MESSENGER spacecraft, the first to orbit Mercury. MESSENGER has acquired over 150,000 images and other extensive data sets, and should continue orbital operations until early 2015.
Image Credit: NASA
UPDATE—Cabin Boy Bill Schmalfeldt likes this picture. He tweets:
RadioWMS I don’t know about you, but I enjoy these closeup pictures of Hoge’s complexion.
3:26 PM – 3 Aug 13 GMT
Taking Mercury for a Spin
All the surface of planet Mercury has now been mapped. Detailed observations of the planet have been being made since the MESSENGER spacecraft first flew by Mercury in 2008 and entered orbit in 2011. Previously, the Mariner 10 flybys in the 1970s photographed only about half of the planet which is too far away for Earth-based telescopes to see any significant detail. This video was put together using thousands of images of Mercury. Exaggerated color enhancement provides better contrast of different surface features. A couple of interesting features to watch for as the planet rotates are sets of rays emanating from impact sites that stretch across much of the planet and the light-colored Caloris Basin, a ancient impact feature that filled with lava in the northern hemisphere.
Video Credit: NASA
Triple Conjunction
While driving back home from Baltimore last night, my son and I saw a rare triple conjunction of the planets Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter in the early night sky. Last night’s show was the most compact arrangement of the planets, but they will be visible together all this week. Mercury and Venus will be a bit higher above the horizon at sunset each night even as Jupiter sinks lower. The picture on the left show the three planets to scale. Venus is the brightest object in the sky other than the Sun or Moon. It’s the planet nearest to Earth and, being closer to the Sun, brightly illuminated. Jupiter is the farthest of the three, but it’s large reflecting area makes up for the distance. Tiny Mercury is closest to the Sun, but reflects the least light to us of the three.
Image Credits: NASA