Emily Lakdawalla • Oct 17, 2008
New images from MESSENGER's Mercury flyby
The MESSENGER team has been releasing images daily since their October 6 flyby, and I've just been too busy to post any. I have, however, been keeping up with where the images plot on my map of Mercury. Finally, yesterday, they released one image that resulted an overlapping set of three, which I could mosaic together, so I thought it was time to post. (Other than that set of three, they've been doing a pretty good job of releasing images that don't overlap with any other images!)
Here's my map, indicating the locations of all the image releases to date (though it doesn't include a couple of the images they posted as part of their comparisons to Mariner 10 data). The strings of letters and numbers are the image file names, which encode which camera was used (N for the narrow-angle camera, W for the wide-angle camera), the time on the spacecraft clock when the image was taken (counting up in seconds roughly since launch), and, for wide-angle camera images, the color of the filter that was used (according to a letter code -- here is an explainer I wrote on the MESSENGER camera that decodes those letter codes).
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