Mercury Fully Mapped by NASA's Messenger Craft

摘要

NASA's Messenger orbiter has completed what scientists hailed as the first complete surface map of the planet Mercury. The probe, built and operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has been orbiting the closet planet to the sun since March 2011, and its team announced Feb. 28 that the spacecraft had finished mapping the planet's surface. "We can now say we have imaged every square meter of Mercury's surface from orbit," said APL's Sean Solomon, principal investigator for the Messenger mission. "Admittedly, some regions are in permanent shadow, but we're actually peering into those shadows with our imaging systems."