By Xinhua
Beijing : NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft sent back to Earth new images of Mercury, unveiling a side of the planet never seen before, media reported Thursday.
The car-sized spacecraft zipped past Mercury in a Monday flyby and is relaying more than 1,200 new images and other data back to eager scientists on Earth.
The pictures of the planet — pockmarked by craters, baked by the sun — have finally filled massive holes in the map of Mercury that persisted since the last space probe visited the sun-blasted planet in the early 1970s.
“We’re looking at the last terra incognita in the inner solar system,” said Ralph L. McNutt, Jr. of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the project scientist for the mission. “And it is beautiful.”
The first look, taken from a distance of 27,000 kilometers (17,000 miles) and released Tuesday, reveals one of the prime targets for the imaging team: the 1,300-kilometer-wide (800-mile-wide) Caloris impact basin that had been only partially visible in the past. It is one of the biggest and youngest craters in the solar system.
Wednesday’s picture, the second in MESSENGER’s series, shows the 200-kilometer-wide (125-mile-wide) Vivaldi crater, which boasts a double ring and was glimpsed by Mariner 10, which flied by the planet in 1974 and 1975.
More images and data followed throughout the night. Further images, as well as some analysis, may be available later Wednesday, McNutt said.
“Everybody is drooling over it,” he said Wednesday morning.
MESSENGER is due to make a second rendezvous at Mercury in October, then swing by on third pass in September 2009. The probe launched in August 2004 flew by Earth once and Venus twice during its 7.9 billion-kilometer (4.9 billion-mile) trek toward Mercury orbit.