In the first pass by planet Mercury since Mariner 10’s 1975 visit, the Messenger spacecraft has captured 1,213 stunning new images. Sean Solomon, principal investigator on the mission, explains a few of the unique pictures of the solar system’s innermost planet:
Spider (left): “The ‘spider’ is unlike any feature Mariner ever saw. There are nearly a hundred sets of extensional faults that burst out from the central region. They look like the legs of some creature that was squished billions of years ago.”
Fault lines (center): “This scarp [the black line running through the upper-left part of the picture] was formed by tectonic activity, where the right was pushed up over the left side, like a typical Earth fault line. This is Mercury’s dominant form of deformation [which, researchers believe, happened when] the planet was shrinking.”
Concentric rings (right): “As an impact on any planet gets bigger, the nature of ...
