![]() ![]() The new product reveals a variety of interesting topographic features, as shown in the accompanying animation, including the highest and lowest points on the planet. Because of the spacecraft's highly eccentric orbit, the laser altimeter was able to make measurements only in Mercury's northern hemisphere and near-equatorial region, leaving the topography of most of the southern hemisphere largely unknown, until now. The new global DEM complements an earlier product released by MESSENGER, the topography map derived from measurements by the Mercury Laser Altimeter. The First Global Topography of the Innermost Planet "The wealth of these data, greatly enhanced by the extension of MESSENGER's primary one-year orbital mission to more than four years, has already enabled and will continue to enable exciting scientific discoveries about Mercury for decades to come," said Ensor, a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Maryland. With this 15th and last major data release, the MESSENGER mission has shared more than 10 terabytes of Mercury science data, including nearly 300,000 images, millions of spectra, and numerous map products, along with interactive tools that allow the public to explore those data, notes Susan Ensor, who for the last nine years has managed the MESSENGER Science Operations Center, which oversees the collection of these data. The global topographic model was among three new products released today by the Planetary Data System (PDS), an organization that archives and distributes all of NASA's planetary mission data. The MESSENGER mission has released the first global digital elevation model (DEM) of Mercury, revealing in stunning detail the topography across the entire innermost planet and paving the way for scientists to characterize fully the planet's geologic history. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington Enhanced colors are created by placing the second principal component, the first principal component, and the ratio of images from the 430 nanometer and 1000 nanometer filters in the red, green, and blue channels, respectively. This view is shown in a polar stereographic map projection, and the north pole is toward the bottom left corner. Near the top of the image, the bright orange region shows the location of a volcanic vent, newly identified because of this map and the source of one of the largest pyroclastic deposits on the planet. Also in this region, the circular rims of impact craters buried by the lava can be identified. ![]() Toward the bottom left portion of the image, large wrinkle ridges, formed during lava cooling, are visible. In the bottom right portion of the image, the 291-kilometer-diameter (181-mile-diameter) Mendelssohn impact basin, named after the German composer, may be seen to have been once nearly filled with lava. ![]() A view of Mercury’s northern volcanic plains from the new map released today, shown in enhanced color to emphasize different types of rocks on Mercury’s surface. ![]()
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