We all know of the planet
Mercury being most well known for
its position closest to the sun. Mercury speeds around the sun at only
88 times a year making it the fastest planet in our solar system by 31
miles per second. As a matter of fact, it gets as close as 29 million
miles away from the sun and can reach temps of upward 800 fahrenheit.
The night time temps are extreme as well due to the lack of atmosphere
the planet has. Those can reach a nasty -280 Fahrenheit!
What we didn’t know until recent was its true colors, literally.
Mercury was always the gray planet closest to the sun.
Our universe explorers NASA have a satellite in orbit called Messenger. Messenger is equipt with a multi filtered camera system that allows itself to isolate color variations and combine them for incredible photographs. It can actually perform
mineralogical studies from orbit! In the pictures below you can see how
Messenger’s pictures
differentiate rock types and colors. The yellowish color indicates a
younger surface while the blueish color is a more aged surface. The
younger surface is obvious due to its lack of impact scares caused by
speeding space debris.
Astronomers wish these color patterns could be
viewed by the bare eye, unfortunately they can only be viewed this way
through the Messenger’s camera technologies.
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| Image credit: NASA / JHU Applied Physics Lab / Carnegie Inst. Washington(original link) |
The Messenger was moving at such a high rate of speed that scientists
could not decipher the mineral composition in the images. On the
upside, Messenger has already settled into orbit in 2011. What this
means is now the scientists will be able to map the surface of Mercury
to the satellites CPU giving us space junkies even better detail and
more info on this beat up, fried planet. We will keep our followers up
to date as possible with further images when made available.
