Mercury mosaics from MESSENGER

I have finished up my mosaics of Mercury and posted them on Unmannedspaceflight.com. These include a medium resolution global mosaic and a high resolution mosaic covering the northern hemisphere.

• 87-frame Global Mosaic - This global mosaic of Mercury consists of 87 MDIS Narrow-angle Camera images acquired during the MESSENGER spacecraft's January 14, 2008 flyby of Mercury. These images were acquired when MESSENGER was between 17,484 and 20,790 km from Mercury or between 53 and 63 minutes after closest approach. This mosaic has a resolution of 550 m/pixel. This mosaic uses calibrated MDIS images and the brightness was adjusted to improve the visibility of surface features. The features seen in this mosaic cover a significant portion of the terrain not seen by Mariner 10 during its three flybys in the 1970s. [JPG PNG]
• Northern Hemisphere Mosaic - This regional mosaic showcasing Mercury's northern hemisphere consists of 96 MDIS Narrow-angle Camera images acquired during the MESSENGER spacecraft's January 14, 2008 flyby of Mercury. These images were acquired when MESSENGER was between 8,148 and 11,516 km from Mercury or between 27.5 and 37 minutes after closest approach. This mosaic has a resolution of 309 m/pixel. This mosaic uses calibrated MDIS images and the brightness was adjusted to improve the visibility of surface features. The features seen in this mosaic cover a significant portion of the terrain not seen by Mariner 10 during its three flybys in the 1970s including a number of features that have been recently named. The Caloris impact, the largest and most recent large impact basin on Mercury, is visible as a circular brightish region along the eastern portion of the mosaic. Another large (and relatively young) impact basin, Raditladi, can be seen to the west of Caloris basin. Both basin are unique because they are host to Mercury's only known extensional tectonic features, represented by concentric and radial grabens (troughs). One such extensional feature, Pantheon Fossae, is a prominent feature in the central part of Caloris basin and consists of a radial pattern of cracks. [JPG PNG]
• High-Resolution Equatorial Mosaic - This regional mosaic showcasing Mercury's equatorial region consists of 68 MDIS Narrow-angle Camera images acquired during the MESSENGER spacecraft's January 14, 2008 flyby of Mercury. These images were acquired when MESSENGER was between 4,110 and 6,322 km from Mercury or between 16 and 22.5 minutes after closest approach. This mosaic has a resolution of 125 m/pixel. This mosaic uses uncalibrated MDIS images and the brightness was adjusted to improve the visibility of surface features. This is MESSENGER's highest resolution mosaic acquired during the January 2008 flyby. This mosaic is centered on 4.5 South Latitude, 128 East Longitude. [JPG]
• Inbound Crescent Mosaic - This global mosaic of Mercury's crescent consists of 29 MDIS Narrow-angle Camera images acquired during the MESSENGER spacecraft's January 14, 2008 flyby of Mercury. These images were acquired when MESSENGER was between 19,189 and 17,853 km from Mercury or between 58 and 54 minutes before closest approach. This mosaic has a resolution of 513 m/pixel. This mosaic uses uncalibrated MDIS images and the brightness was adjusted to improve the visibility of surface features. This is MESSENGER's highest resolution mosaic acquired during the January 2008 flyby. The features seen in this mosaic were observed by Mariner 10 in the 1970s, but the high-phase angle allows scientists better study the topographic structures in this region. [PNG]

Link: Mercury mosaics from January 2008 Flyby [unnmannedspaceflight.com]

More MESSENGER at Mercury mosaics

Still working on mosaics of images from the MESSENGER mission's January flyby of Mercury. Here are a few more I've worked on. WARNING: these mosaics are quite large, so it may be best to right-click, save to hard drive, then view it on a your favorite image viewer.

• Mosaic covering the double ring crater Raditladi and the ejecta surrounding the crater (PNG, 3006x3341, 5.36 MB)
• Central part of Caloris Basin including Apollodorus, Cunningham, and Atget craters (PNG, 3912x2744, 4.86 MB)
• 3x5 mosaic covering Eminescu and Xiao Zhao craters (PNG, 4872x2936, 7.36 MB)

I am currently trying to generate a 8000x8000 pixel full-disk mosaic of Mercury. Not sure how well it will go. Photoshop hates these REALLY large mosaics... That's why I cut up the northern hemisphere mosaics into several, smaller chunks. Here is what I have so far showing the southern polar region.

MESSENGER at Mercury

Not Io related, but still interesting. There is a new special issue in Science on results from the MESSENGER flyby of Mercury this past January. One of the most interesting results were from FIPS instrument which suggested the presence of water ions in Mercury's rarefied atmosphere.

In the last day, I've been playing around the with the images of Mercury taken by MESSENGER last January. Here are a selection:

• Inbound crescent mosaic (PNG, 4122x7563, 9.22 MB)
• Outbound global mosaic (PNG, 4586x5606, 11.5 MB)
• High-resolution mosaic of Mercury's equator (JPG, 15402x3664, 7.26 MB)
  

Back and Ready to Go

Sorry I haven't managed to post in a while, I guess I have been on pseudo-vacation for the month of June. Maybe not so much a vacation, I still worked on my Cassini projects, but I've been trying, during June, to not do work during the evenings and such when I would usually work on blog posts or other extra-curricular activities.

Now that I am back, I will try to get a few blog posts out the door over the next couple of days. First, there is a paper in press in Icarus on Io's plumes as seen by Galileo. Second, I want to talk about some of the updates with respect to the flagship missions. I might post the next update as a podcast as a way to make it easier to get this rather long update out to you faster. If any of you have some good audio capture and editing software you can recommend, let me know.