PIA10381: Topographic Close-up
A close-up of the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) profile of Mercury acquired during NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft's first Mercury flyby on January 14, 2008.
 Target Name:  Mercury
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  MESSENGER 
 Spacecraft:  MESSENGER
 Instrument:  MLA 
 Product Size:  3000 x 2025 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Johns Hopkins University/APL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA10381.tif (18.23 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA10381.jpg (357.3 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

A close-up of the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) profile of Mercury acquired during MESSENGER's first Mercury flyby on January 14, 2008. Comparison with an Arecibo radar image mosaic (bottom) provided by Harmon and co-workers shows that the two largest depressions are adjacent impact craters. The craters have rim-to-rim diameters of 107 km (left) and 122 km (right). The root mean square roughness of the floor the larger crater is ~35 m. The vertical exaggeration in the figure is 35:1.

These images are from MESSENGER, a NASA Discovery mission to conduct the first orbital study of the innermost planet, Mercury. For information regarding the use of images, see the MESSENGER image use policy.

Image Credit:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Cornell University/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Image Addition Date:
2008-01-30