SpaceRef: Mercury Today

NASA has announced that it will extend the MESSENGER mission for an additional year of orbital operations at Mercury beyond the planned end of the primary mission on March 17, 2012.

The crater at the center of this image is named Dickens, after Charles Dickens, the English novelist who lived from 1812 to 1870. Among Dickens' famous works is A Christmas Carol.

NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin today released an audit examining NASA's real property master planning efforts.

Members of the MESSENGER team will present a broad range of findings from the spacecraft's orbital investigation of Mercury during the 2011 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which takes place this week, December 5-9, in San Francisco.

The MESSENGER spacecraft successfully completed a fifth orbit-correction maneuver today to lower MESSENGER's periapsis altitude from 442 to 200 kilometers and decrease the orbital period from 12 hours to 11 hours and 47 minutes.

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 250-meter/pixel morphology base map or the 1-km/pixel color base map.

This image was acquired as part of MDIS's high-resolution surface morphology base map. The surface morphology base map will cover more than 90% of Mercury's surface with an average resolution of 250 meters/pixel (0.16 miles/pixel or 820 feet/pixel).

The small crater at the left side of this image is named for Juan de Mena, a Spanish poet of the 15th century. Mena has extensive bright rays, which can be better appreciated in the global map of Mercury (right on the equator, part way in from the left).

These images were acquired as high-resolution targeted observations. Targeted observations are images of a small area on Mercury's surface at resolutions much higher than the 250-meter/pixel morphology base map or the 1-kilometer/pixel color base map.

The small green square in this image marks the point at zero degrees latitude and 180 degrees longitude on Mercury's surface. This is one of Mercury's two "hot poles."

NASA has announced that it will extend the MESSENGER mission for an additional year of orbital operations at Mercury beyond the planned end of the primary mission on March 17, 2012.

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Dominici crater, the very bright crater to the top of this image, exhibits bright rays and contains hollows. This crater lies upon the peak ring of Homer Basin, a very degraded peak ring basin that has been filled by volcanism.

This mosaic is made primarily of MDIS images acquired as part of the surface morphology base map, which during the first six months of MESSENGER's orbital mission mapped over 98.7% of the surface with nearly 22,000 images.

NASA's MESSENGER probe has discovered a surprise on Mercury in the form of hollows in the surface of the innermost planet. What's creating these hollows?