NASA’s MESSENGER has revealed a Topographic map of Mercury after the spacecraft ran out of fuel and slammed into the planet’s surface last year, bringing an extraordinary eleven year mission to a successful end. The Planetary Data System (PDS) released the first global elevation model of Mercury’s surface on Friday. MESSENGER Mission News reports: 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, notes Susan Ensor, who for the last nine years has managed the MESSENGER Science Operations Center, which oversees the collection of these data. “The wealth of these data, greatly enhanced by the extension of MESSENGER’s primary one-year orbital mission to more than four years, has already enabled and will continue to enable exciting scientific discoveries about Mercury for decades to come,” said Ensor, a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics [...]
