Seeing Part of Mercury For The First Time
Unseen Mercury Revealed
“Yesterday, as the spacecraft approached Mercury for the mission’s third flyby of the Solar System’s innermost planet, MESSENGER captured this striking view.
This WAC image shows portions of Mercury’s surface that had remained unseen by spacecraft even after the three flybys by Mariner 10 in 1974-75 and MESSENGER’s two earlier flybys in 2008.
In this image, just returned to Earth early this morning, the newly imaged terrain is located in a wide vertical strip near the limb of the planet (on the left side of Mercury’s partially sunlit disk).”