Results from the MESSENGER fly-by
16 Jan at 16:43 by Wilson
Science data is a little slow in coming from this Tuesday’s fly-by of Mercury, but according to NASA everything went as planned and the spacecraft seems to be were it was expected to be. The ground-based antennas are busy handling unexpected problems with Ulysses, another mission exploring that area of the Solar System (it just went over the north pole of the Sun), but we should get more info soon.
Meanwhile, the photo illustrating this article is the first one released by NASA (click on the image to enlarge). It was taken 80 minutes after the closest approach, when MESSENGER was already 27,000km away and looking back. It shows parts of the planet that had never been photographed before (they were not seen by Mariner 10), and that’s just the beginning; we can expect many more pictures over the next few weeks, and we can expect to see most of the features of the planet in colour.
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