MESSENGER | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory | 2016 May 06
[c][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRsaHLfZxbU[/youtube]MESSENGER: Global Digital Elevation Model of MercuryThe MESSENGER mission has released the first global digital elevation model (DEM) of Mercury, revealing in stunning detail the topography across the entire innermost planet and paving the way for scientists to characterize fully the planet’s geologic history.
Credits: NASA/USGS/ASU/CIW/JHU-APL[/c]
The global topographic model was among three new products released today by the Planetary Data System (PDS), an organization that archives and distributes all of NASA’s planetary mission data. With this 15th and last major data release, the MESSENGER mission has shared more than 10 terabytes of Mercury science data, including nearly 300,000 images, millions of spectra, and numerous map products, along with interactive tools that allow the public to explore those data ...
The new global DEM complements an earlier product released by MESSENGER, the topography map derived from measurements by the Mercury Laser Altimeter. Because of the spacecraft’s highly eccentric orbit, the laser altimeter was able to make measurements only in Mercury’s northern hemisphere and near-equatorial region, leaving the topography of most of the southern hemisphere largely unknown, until now. ...