1000 Downloaded Images Mosaic

On August 3, 2004 the MESSENGER spacecraft blasted off into space from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, entering orbit around the innermost planet some six and a half years later, on March 18, 2011.

Over the course of the mission, the MESSENGER team has been posting Featured Images at regular intervals. The first image was posted in August 2005 -- and today we've hit 1,000 Featured Images!

This mosaic celebrates the incredible range of images, maps, and other scientific data shared by the MESSENGER team in more than eight years of web postings, but of course contains just a small percentage of the total collection of images now available online. Although we can't list them all, see if you can spot some highlights like the MESSENGER stamp, Mercury's dark and mysterious north pole, the Caloris basin in full color, lava channels, Pantheon Fossae, images of Earth and Venus, and the Cookie Monster!

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington