Tuesday, October 6, 2009

More Mercury Mosaics from MESSENGER's 2nd Flyby

Tonight, I finished up a few more mosaics from MESSENGER's second flyby of Mercury that took place one year ago today.  I am glad to see so many liked the global mosaic posted yesterday.  We had almost as many visitors yesterday and today (so far) as we had all of last month :-O  Anyways, these new mosaics include a four-frame color mosaic shown at left, a five-frame, high-resolution color mosaic, and a 29-frame, monochrome very high-resolution mosaic.

The color mosaic [high resolution version] is four-frame mosaic consisting of MESSENGER MDIS narrow-angle camera images.  This approximately true-color view of Mercury uses the Blue, Green, and Red filters on the Wide-angle camera (the "C", "D", and "E" filters", respectively).  This mosaic was reprojected to an orthographic projection with a resolution of 2.175 kilometers (1.351 miles) per pixel.  It centered near 0.73 degrees South latitude, 320.83 degrees East longitude.  This basically covers the same territory from the global mosaic posted yesterday.  As you can see from this mosaic, there really isn't much color variation in the visible portion of the spectrum, but they do start to show up when comparing the near-infrared and the ultraviolet filter images.


This next mosaic is a five-frame, wide-angle-camera color mosaic taken shortly after closest approach to Mercury during last year's encounter [full-resolution version].  This mosaic is in simple cylindrical projection (more like a standard map) and has a resolution of 288 meters (945 feet) per pixel.  This mosaic shows the equatorial region of Mercury starting just west of the crater Boethius (seen on the boundary between the first two frames) and runs east to the impact basin Homer (visible, though not very conspicuous, in the eastern half of the last frame).


This last mosaic is a 29-frame, narrow-angle-camera mosaic that covers a strip across the equatorial region of Mercury [full-resolution version].  This mosaic is in orthographic projection and has a resolution of 100 meters (328 feet) per pixel.  This mosaic covers much of same area as shown above and runs from just west of the crater Machaut, across portions of the lava-filled basins Boethius, Polygnotus, and Thākur, across three more (larger) lava-filled basins (the last being named Homer), and finally ends at the impact crater Lu Hsun.

I think with that, I am all "Mercuried" out.  There is still maybe two more mosaics I would want to do: the northern hemisphere regional mosaic and the inbound, crescent mosaic.  These are two large mosaics so I may hold off on doing them.  I hope you all like these.

3 comments:

  1. how is the color on that top one… looks more like callisto. is that close to real color or should it be more grey?

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  2. Great work! Too bad you've overdosed on Mercury. Maybe detox with Cassini images, so yuo'll be refreshed in time for Messenger's capture?

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