JHUAPL Archives

September 10, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

A Mercurial Milestone: 1,000 Featured Images from MESSENGER!

The MESSENGER team celebrates 1,000 featured images of the innermost planet!

It’s been nearly two and a half years since the NASA-sponsored MESSENGER mission entered orbit around Mercury — the first spacecraft ever to do so — and today the MESSENGER team celebrated the 1,000th featured image on the mission site with a mosaic of discovery highlights, seen above.

“I thought it sensible to produce a collage for the 1,000th web image because of the sheer volume of images the team has already posted, as no single picture could encompass the enormous breadth of Mercury science covered in these postings,” explained MESSENGER Fellow Paul Byrne, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “Some of the images represent aspects of Mercury’s geological characteristics, and others are fun extras, such as the U.S. Postal Service’s Mercury stamp. The ‘1,000’ superimposed on the collage is a reminder of the major milestone the team has reached in posting 1,000 featured images — and even a motivation to post 1,000 more.”

See the very first image MESSENGER obtained from orbit below:

The Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) team has posted a new image to the MESSENGER website approximately once per business day since March 29, 2011, when this first image of Mercury's surface obtained from orbit was made public. — The Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) team has posted a new image to the MESSENGER website approximately once per business day since March 29, 2011, when this first image of Mercury’s surface obtained from orbit was made public.

“During this two-year period, MESSENGER’s daily web image has been a successful mechanism for sharing results from the mission with the public at large,” said Nancy Chabot, MDIS Instrument Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Chabot has been leading the release of web images since MESSENGER’s first flyby of Mercury in January 2008.

“The first image I released was this one, as MESSENGER approached Mercury for the mission’s first Mercury flyby,” said Chabot. “Mercury was just a small crescent in the image, but it was still very exciting for me. We were obtaining the first spacecraft images of Mercury since Mariner 10 transmitted its final image in 1975, and this was just the beginning of the flood of images that followed.”

One of the first spacecraft images of Mercury since Mariner 10 transmitted its final image in 1975

The herculean effort involved in posting a new image every business day was made possible by a small team of scientists in addition to Chabot and Byrne, including APL’s David Blewett, Brett Denevi, Carolyn Ernst, Rachel Klima, Nori Laslo, and Heather Meyer.

“Creating images and captions for the MESSENGER Image Gallery has been fun and interesting,” Blewett said. “Working on a Gallery release gives me a chance take a break from my regular research and look all around Mercury’s surface for an image that the general public might find to be engaging from a scientific, artistic, or humorous perspective (and sometimes all three!).”

Watch: Take a Spin Around Mercury

“The posting of the 1,000th image of Mercury on our web gallery is a wonderful benchmark, but there’s much more to come,” adds MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “MESSENGER’s altitude at closest approach is steadily decreasing, and in a little more than six months our spacecraft will be able to view Mercury at closer range than ever before with each orbit. Stay tuned!”

Source: MESSENGER news release

Image credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) is a NASA-sponsored scientific investigation of the planet Mercury and the first space mission designed to orbit the planet closest to the Sun. The MESSENGER spacecraft launched on August 3, 2004, and entered orbit about Mercury on March 17, 2011 (March 18, 2011 UTC).

August 27, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Evidence of Internal Moon Water Found

The central peak of Bullialdus crater (Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)

Scientists have detected magmatic water — water that originates from deep within the Moon’s interior — on the surface of the Moon. These findings represent the first such remote detection of this type of lunar water, and were arrived at using data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) carried aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter.

The discovery represents an exciting contribution to the rapidly changing understanding of lunar water according to Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and lead author of the paper, “Remote detection of magmatic water in Bullialdus Crater on the Moon” published in the August 25 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Nov. 8, 2008

“For many years, researchers believed that the rocks from the Moon were ‘bone dry’ and that any water detected in the Apollo samples had to be contamination from Earth,” said Klima, a member of the NASA Lunar Science Institute’s (NLSI) Scientific and Exploration Potential of the Lunar Poles team. “About five years ago, new laboratory techniques used to investigate lunar samples revealed that the interior of the Moon is not as dry as we previously thought. Around the same time, data from orbital spacecraft detected water on the lunar surface, which is thought to be a thin layer formed from solar wind hitting the lunar surface.”

“This surficial water unfortunately did not give us any information about the magmatic water that exists deeper within the lunar crust and mantle, but we were able to identify the rock types in and around Bullialdus crater,” said co-author Justin Hagerty, of the U.S. Geological Survey. “Such studies can help us understand how the surficial water originated and where it might exist in the lunar mantle.”

LRO image of the 60-km Bullialdus crater (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)

M3 (pronounced “M-cube”) fully imaged the large impact crater Bullialdus in 2009. “It’s within 25 degrees latitude of the equator and so not in a favorable location for the solar wind to produce significant surface water,” Klima explained. “The rocks in the central peak of the crater are of a type called norite that usually crystallizes when magma ascends but gets trapped underground instead of erupting at the surface as lava. Bullialdus crater is not the only location where this rock type is found, but the exposure of these rocks combined with a generally low regional water abundance enabled us to quantify the amount of internal water in these rocks.”

See detailed reports of M3 data regarding hydroxyls in Bullialdus crater from NASA’s Lunar Planetary Institute (LPI) here.

After examining the M3 data, Klima and her colleagues found that the crater has significantly more hydroxyl — a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom — compared to its surroundings. “The hydroxyl absorption features were consistent with hydroxyl bound to magmatic minerals that were excavated from depth by the impact that formed Bullialdus crater,” Klima writes.

The internal magmatic water provides information about the Moon’s volcanic processes and internal composition, Klima said. “Understanding this internal composition helps us address questions about how the Moon formed, and how magmatic processes changed as it cooled. There have been some measurements of internal water in lunar samples, but until now this form of native lunar water has not been detected from orbit.”

“This impressive research confirms earlier lab analyses of Apollo samples, and will help broaden our understanding of how this water originated and where it might exist in the lunar mantle.”

– Yvonne Pendleton, NLSI Director

Source: JHUAPL News Release

August 20, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

On the Edge of Tyagaraja

Hi-res targeted MESSENGER image of the interior of Tyagaraja crater (north is to the right).

Here’s a rather interesting view from orbit around the innermost planet: Mercury’s Tyagaraja crater, the interior of which is seen here in an oblique-angled image acquired by the MESSENGER spacecraft on November 12, 2011 (and released August 16, 2013.)

This view looks west across the northern portion of the 97-kilometer (60-mile) -wide crater, and shows some of its large central peaks, terraced walls, and bright erosion features called hollows that are spread across a wide swath of its interior.

First seen by MESSENGER in 2011, hollows are thought to indicate an erosion process unique to Mercury because of its composition and close proximity to the Sun. The lack of craters within hollows seems to indicate that they are relatively young features… in fact, they may be part of a process that continues today.

This image was acquired as a high-resolution targeted observation. Targeted observations are images of a small area on Mercury’s surface at resolutions much higher than the 200-meter/pixel morphology base map.

Enhanced-color image of Tyagaraja crater acquired on Sept. 29, 2011. Its large hollow field is highlighted.

Tyagaraja is named after Kakarla Tyagabrahmam, an 18th-century composer of classical Indian Carnatic music.

Images: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

May 14, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Mercury Shows Off Its Reds, Whites, and Blues

An 11-color MESSENGER targeted image of Mercury's Tyagaraja crater

At first glance, the planet Mercury may bear a striking resemblance to our own Moon. True, both are heavily-cratered, airless worlds that hide pockets of ice inside polar shadows… but there the similarities end. In addition to being compositionally different than the Moon, Mercury also has surface features that you won’t find on the lunar surface — or anywhere else in the Solar System.

The picture above, part of an 11-color targeted image acquired by MESSENGER on April 25, 2013, shows the varied terrain found within the 97-kilometer-wide Tyagaraja crater located near Mercury’s equator. The reds, blues, greens, and oranges, much more saturated than anything we’d see with our own eyes, correspond to surface materials of different compositions… and the brightest spots within the crater are features called “hollows” that are truly unique to Mercury, possibly resulting from the planet’s close interaction with the solar wind.

First noted in September of 2011, hollows have been identified across many areas of Mercury. One hypothesis is that they’re formed by the sublimation of subsurface material exposed inside larger craters. Being so close to the Sun and lacking a protective atmosphere, Mercury is constantly being scoured by the solar wind — a relentless stream of charged particles that’s actively “sandblasting” exposed volatiles from the planet’s surface!

Read more about hollows here.

A previous MESSENGER image of hollows inside Tyagaraja crater

The reddish spot at the center of the crater in the top image is likely material surrounding a pyroclastic vent, which appear red and orange in MDIS images. The dark material that appears bluish is something called “low reflectance material” (LRM).

The image was acquired as a targeted high-resolution 11-color image set. Acquiring 11-color targets is a new MESSENGER campaign that began in March and utilizes all of the Wide-Angle Camera’s 11 narrow-band color filters. Because of the large data volume involved, only features of special scientific interest are targeted for imaging in all 11 colors.

Full of geologically interesting features the crater was named for Kakarla Tyagabrahmam, an 18th century composer of classical South Indian music.

The first spacecraft to establish orbit around Mercury in summer 2011, MESSENGER is capable of continuing orbital operations until early 2015.

Read more on the Johns Hopkins University APL MESSENGER site here.

Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

March 22, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

MESSENGER Sees a Smoother Side of Mercury

A high-resolution view of a "silky" surface on Mercury

During its two years in orbit around Mercury — as well as several more years performing flybys — the MESSENGER spacecraft has taken over 150,000 images of the innermost planet, giving us a look at its incredibly rugged, Sun-scoured surface like never before. But not all areas on Mercury appear so harsh — it has its softer sides too, as seen above in an image released earlier today.

Here we see the smooth walls, floor and upper surfaces around an irregular depression on Mercury in high definition. The velvety texture is the result of widespread layering of fine particles, because unlike many features on Mercury’s ancient surface this rimless depression wasn’t caused by an impact from above but rather explosively escaping lava from below — this is the rim of a volcanic vent, not a crater!

Previous images have been acquired of this irregularly-shaped depression but this is the highest resolution view MESSENGER has captured to date — about 26 meters per pixel.

A wide-angle view of the same depression, captured in July 2012 — A wide-angle view of the same depression, captured by MESSENGER in July 2012

The full depression, located northeast of the Rachmaninoff basin, is about 36 km (22 miles) across at its widest. It’s surrounded by a smooth blanket of high-reflectance material — explosively ejected volcanic particles from a pyroclastic eruption that spread over the surface like snow.

Other similar vents have been found on Mercury, like this heart-shaped one in Caloris basin. The smooth, bright surface material is a telltale sign of a volcanic outburst, as are the rimless, irregular shapes of the vents.

The numerous small craters that are seen inside the vent and on the smooth surrounding surfaces would be from meteorite impacts that occurred well after the eruption.

On March 17, 2011, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft ever to orbit the planet Mercury. It is capable of continuing orbital operations until early 2015. Find out more about the mission here.

Image credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

February 19, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Take a Spin Around Mercury

Color map of Mercury's varied surface. The 1,550-km-wide Caloris Basin can be seen at upper right.

Created by the MESSENGER mission team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, this animation gives us a look at the spinning globe of Mercury, its surface color-coded to reflect variations in surface material reflectance.

Thousands of Wide Angle Camera images of Mercury’s surface were stitched together to create the full-planet views.

While the vibrant colors don’t accurately portray Mercury as our eyes would see it, they are valuable to scientists as they highlight the many different types of materials that make up the planet’s surface. Young crater rays surrounding fresh impact craters appear light blue or white. Medium- and dark-blue “low-reflectance material” (LRM) areas are thought to be rich in a dark, opaque mineral. Tan areas are plains formed by eruption of highly fluid lavas. Small orange spots are materials deposited by explosive volcanic eruptions.

At this point, over 99% of the Solar System’s innermost planet has been mapped by MESSENGER. Read more about the ongoing mission here.

Image/video credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

January 15, 2013December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

A Hi-Res Mosaic of Mercury’s Crescent

A view of Mercury from MESSENGER’s October 2008 flyby (NASA / JHUAPL / Gordan Ugarkovic)

Every now and then a new gem of a color-composite appears in the Flickr photostream of Gordan Ugarkovic, and this one is the latest to materialize.

This is a view of Mercury as seen by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft during a flyby in October 2008. The image is a composite of twenty separate frames acquired with MESSENGER’s narrow-angle camera from distances ranging from 18,900 to 17,700 kilometers and colorized with color data from the spacecraft’s wide-angle camera. (North is to the right.)

Click the image for a closer look, and for an even bigger planet-sized version click here. Beautiful!

The images that made up this mosaic were taken two and a half years before MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury on March 19, 2011 UT, becoming the first spacecraft ever to do so and making Mercury the final “classical” planet to be orbited by a manmade spacecraft.

Since that time MESSENGER has completed well over 1,000 orbits and taken more than 100,000 images of the first planet in the Solar System, which filled in most of our gaps in Mercury’s map and showed us many never-before-seen features of the planet’s Sun-scoured surface. And just this past year MESSENGER’s extended mission helped confirm what could be called its most important discovery of all: water ice on Mercury’s north pole.

This was even selected by Scientific American as one of the Top 5 Space Stories of 2012.

With all that’s been achieved by MESSENGER in 2011 and 2012, 2013 is looking to be an interesting year!

“We learned a great deal about Mercury over the past year,” said MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The team published three dozen scientific and technical papers and delivered more than 150 presentations at national and international meetings. New measurements continue to stream back from our spacecraft, and we can look forward with excitement to many additional discoveries in 2013.”

Follow the MESSENGER mission news here and see more of Gordan’s space images here.

Inset image: 12 Mercurial discoveries by MESSENGER in 2012. Click to review.

November 27, 2012January 4, 2016 by Jason Major

Lighting Up Mercury’s Shadowy North Pole

Part of a stereographic projection of Mercury’s north pole

Talk about northern exposure! This is a section of a much larger image, released today by the MESSENGER team, showing the heavily-cratered north pole of Mercury as seen by the MESSENGER spacecraft’s Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument.

See the full-size image below:

Many MDIS images were averaged together to create a mosaic of Mercury’s polar region, which this stereographic projection is centered on. MESSENGER is at its lowest altitude as it passes over Mercury’s northern hemisphere — about 200 kilometers (124 miles), which is just a little over half the altitude of the ISS.

The largest centrally-peaked crater near the center is Prokofiev, named after a 20th-century Russian composer. Approximately 110 km (68 mi.) in diameter, its permanently-shadowed interior is home to radar-bright deposits that are thought to contain water ice.

Even though Mercury is almost three times closer to the Sun than Earth is and hosts searing daytime temperatures of 425ºC (800ºF), there’s virtually no atmosphere to hold or transmit that heat. Nighttime temperatures can reach as low as -185ºC (-300ºF), and since a day on Mercury is 176 Earth days long it gets very cold for quite a long time!

Also, because Mercury’s axis of rotation isn’t tilted like Earth’s, low elevation areas near the poles receive literally no sunlight. Unless vaporized by a meteorite impact any ice gathered inside these deep craters would remain permanently frozen.

Here’s an orthographic projection of the image above, showing what the scene would look like on Mercury — that is, if it was ever fully lit by the Sun, which it isn’t.

Many of the craters on Mercury’s north pole have recently been named after famous artists, authors and composers, such as Kandinsky, Stieglitz, Goethe, and even one named after J.R.R. Tolkien. You can see an annotated image showing the names of Mercury’s north polar craters here.

On November 29, NASA will host a news conference at 2 p.m. EST to reveal new observations from MESSENGER, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The news conference will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency’s website… you can tune in on NASA TV here.

Image credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

October 1, 2012December 23, 2015 by Jason Major

Mercury’s Surface is Full of Sulfur

The southern portion of Mercury’s Vivaldi basin and outlying rugged terrain

Named for the 17th-century Venetian composer, the southern half of Mercury’s Vivaldi basin is seen in this image acquired on August 26 by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft. The 213-km (132-mile) -wide crater’s smooth floor is contrasted by the incredibly rugged terrain beyond its outermost ring — a result of the ejected material that was flung out from the impact site and emphasized by the low angle of illumination.

The floor of the crater remained relatively smooth due to molten material that erupted in the wake of the impact event, flooding the basin.

Recent findings from the MESSENGER mission have revealed variations in Mercury’s surface composition due to volcanism that occurred at different times, as well as a surprising concentration of elements like magnesium and sulfur — much more so than any of the other terrestrial planets.

In results to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, scientists report that Mercury’s volcanic smooth plains differ in composition from older surrounding terrains. The older terrain has higher ratios of magnesium to silicon, sulfur to silicon, and calcium to silicon, but lower ratios of aluminum to silicon, suggesting that the smooth plains material erupted from a magma source that was chemically different from the source of the material in the older regions, according to Shoshana Weider of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the lead author on the paper.

Mercury’s surface was also found to be high in magnesium and sulfur-enriched minerals.

“None of the other terrestrial planets have such high levels of sulfur. We are seeing about ten times the amount of sulfur than on Earth and Mars,” Weider said. “In terms of magnesium, we do have some materials on Earth that are high in magnesium. They tend to be ancient volcanic rocks that formed from very hot lavas. So this composition on Mercury tells us that eruptions of high-temperature lavas might have formed these high-magnesium materials.”

Read: MESSENGER Reveals Mercury’s Colors

The data was gathered with MESSENGER’s X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) — one of two instruments designed to measure the abundances of many key elements in the top 2mm of Mercury’s crust. XRS detects emissions from elements in the 1-10 kiloelectron-volt (keV) range – specifically, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, sulfur, calcium, titanium, and iron.

Read more on the MESSENGER mission site here.

Inset image: A global mosaic of Mercury from MESSENGER (2011). Image credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

July 17, 2012April 26, 2016 by Jason Major

Postcards From The (Inner) Edge

As the world turns its gaze outward in anticipation of the arrival of Mars Science Laboratory — with its hair-raising “seven minutes of terror” landing — let’s take a moment to look back inward, where MESSENGER is still faithfully orbiting the first rock from the Sun, Mercury, and sending back images that could only have been imagined just a few years ago.

The image above shows the graben-gouged terrain around Balanchine crater, within Mercury’s vast Caloris Basin impact crater. Named for the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, Balanchine crater is 41 km (25.5 miles) in diameter and filled with the curious erosion features known as hollows. Graben — basically sunken troughs in the surface — are the result of extensional forces that have pulled sections of the planet’s upper crust apart.

This image shows the peak-ring structure located within the much larger crater Rustaveli, which is 180 km (112 miles) in diameter. One of the more recently-named craters (the IAU convention for new features on Mercury has them titled after renowned artists, writers and composers from history) Rustaveli is named for a 12th-century Georgian poet who wrote the epic “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”. The crater that now bears his namesake is located on Mercury’s northern hemisphere.

These two craters — also located within Caloris Basin — don’t yet have names but are no less interesting. Their overlapping positions works like an optical illusion, making the newer,sharper-edged crater on the right seem to almost float above the surface. The false-color of the image highlights the difference in surface composition of the two craters, which are both about 40 km (24 miles) wide. (The Caloris Basin in which they reside, however, is one of the largest known impact sites in our solar system, measuring at 1550 km — 963 miles — across!)

Now we zoom out for a wider view of our solar system’s second-densest planet (Earth is the first) and take a look at an image that’s night and day — literally! This is Mercury’s terminator, the twilit dividing line between night and day. More than just making a pretty picture, data on this transition is valuable to scientists as some atmospheric phenomena can only be observed at the terminator, such as the interaction between surface dust and charged particles from the Sun (which, at less than half the distance to the Sun than we are, Mercury is constantly bathed in.)

And now to zoom back in, we get a good look at an unnamed central-peaked crater about 85 km (52 miles) across in an oblique view that highlights the hollows and depressions within its floor. Acquired as part of what’s called a “targeted observation”, high-resolution images like this (79 meters/pixel) allow scientists to closely investigate specific features — but sadly there’s just not enough mission time to image all of Mercury at this level of detail.

On March 17, 2011 (March 18, 2011, UTC), MESSENGER became the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury. The mission has provided the first data from Mercury since Mariner 10, over 30 years ago. After over 1,000 orbits, 98 percent of Mercury is now imaged in detail, allowing us to know more about our solar system’s innermost world than ever before.

Keep up with MESSENGER updates (and the latest images) on the mission website here.

Image credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington