mercredi 30 mars 2011

First Image Ever Obtained from Mercury Orbit












NASA - MESSENGER Mission to Mercury patch.

30 March 2011


At 5:20 am EDT on Mar. 29, 2011, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. The MESSENGER team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down.

Image, Text, Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch