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This colorful view of Mercury is similar to that used to generate this movie [23MB, 6.5MB] of Mercury as a spinning globe, and these two individual views (centered at 140°E and 320°E) of the innermost planet. The enhanced color view is overlaid on the global monochrome base map, which is available for download here.
The enhanced color was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER's primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury's surface. This specific color combination places the second principal component in the red channel, the first principal component in the green channel, and the ratio of the 430 nm/1000 nm filters in the blue channel.
Instrument: Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Center Latitude: 0°
Center Longitude: 180° E
Map Projection: Simple cylindrical projection
Resolution: 3.74 km/pixel
Scale: Mercury's diameter is 4880 kilometers (3030 miles)
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Today's offering shows two views of the crater Berkel. The image on the left is a monochrome image obtained when the Sun was lower on the horizon than when the color image on the right was collected. As a result, the left image emphasizes the topography of the surface (due to the presence of shadowing), whereas the image on the right is dominated by inherent differences in reflectance and color. The impact that formed Berkel excavated dark subsurface material and deposited it around the crater's rim. The presence of this low reflectance material causes the floor of the crater to appear black in the color image.
The image on the left is part of MDIS's high-resolution surface morphology base map. The surface morphology base map covers more than 90% of Mercury's surface with an average resolution of 250 meters/pixel (0.16 miles/pixel or 820 feet/pixel). Images acquired for the surface morphology base map typically have off-vertical Sun angles (i.e., high incidence angles) and visible shadows so as to reveal clearly the topographic form of geologic features.
The image on the right image is part of MDIS's color base map. The color base map is composed of WAC images taken through eight different narrow-band color filters and covers more than 90% of Mercury's surface with an average resolution of 1 kilometer/pixel (0.6 miles/pixel). The highest-quality color images are obtained for Mercury's surface when both the spacecraft and the Sun are overhead, so these images typically are taken with viewing conditions of low incidence and emission angles. The false-color presentation here has images taken through the 750-nm, 560-nm and 480-nm filters as red-green-blue.
Scale: Berkel crater is about 22 km (14 mi.) in diameter
Location: Berkel is located at -13.75° latitude, 26.9° E longitude
Instrument: Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
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