CANADA: Images taken by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft and released in the probe’s final days use colour to reveal the mineral composition of Mercury’s surface.
New images of Mercury show the planet as we’ve never seen it before: in a psychedelic profusion of colours. The images don’t show how Mercury looks in the visible light spectrum. Rather, they are composites, composed of years of data collated by the Mercury Atmosphere and Surface Composition Spectrometer instrument aboard NASA’s Messenger spacecraft and have provided researches with new insights about Mercury.
The spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the planet for four years, is due to be retired on Thursday — by crashing into Mercury’s surface at a speed of more than 8,750 miles per hour (3.91 kilometres per second). This will be done on the side closest to Earth so that NASA researchers can observe the impact in real time and receive data from the probe as it descends.
Ever since the probe entered Mercury’s orbit in 2011, it has been diligently collecting measurements of the surface of the planet, in hundreds of different wavelengths of light, from ultraviolet through to near-infrared. These wavelengths and combinations of wavelengths were then mapped into red, green and blue colours.
You can probably make out a little bit of what they show, which was the purpose of colour-coding the wavelengths in the first place. Some show the mineral composition of the surface; while others show the age of craters, or volcanic vents. This allows these relatively small features to be studied much more easily.
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