Getting your player ready...
After 32 years and two space-probe missions, mankind finally knows what the back side of Mercury looks like: about the same as the front. But pictures of the planet transmitted this week by the Messenger space probe have finally filled massive holes in the map of Mercury.
“We’re looking at the last terra incognita in the inner solar system, and it is beautiful,” said Ralph McNutt Jr. of Johns Hopkins University, the project scientist for the mission. NASA’s Mariner 10 was the last spacecraft to snap Mercury at close range, in 1975; those images showed just one hemisphere.
University of Colorado engineers built an $8.7 million spectrometer for Messenger to help parse Mercury’s chemical makeup.
