First images from Mercury orbit released

For the first time, NASA has released images of Mercury taken directly from the planet's orbit.

These are images sent from the Messenger probe, launched by the US Space Agency (NASA). This spacecraft became the first artificial satellite in history to reach Mercury on March 18, 2011.

Image of Mercury taken from the Messenger spacecraft.

Messenger has captured historic images of Mercury, the first ever taken from orbit around the planet closest to the Sun. In six hours, Messenger sent 363 images back to Earth.

At the time of the images, Messenger was flying over Mercury's south pole. The top of the image shows the Debussy crater, which is 80 km in diameter. The bottom of the image shows an area near Mercury's south pole that has never been seen before. The images have a resolution of 2.7 km/pixel and were taken with the wide-angle camera Wae.

The Messenger probe was launched in August 2004 and has
travel 7.8 billion kilometers before reaching Mercury.

The Messenger probe was launched in August 2004 and traveled 7.8 billion kilometers before reaching Mercury. Relatively little is known about the planet, with most of it coming from data from the Mariner-10 probe in 2009 and now Messenger. Until recently, Mercury was the only planet visible to the naked eye that had not yet been reached by a probe.

According to KH&DS