Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Some very cool news for all you astronomy geeks out there:
Early this morning, at 5:20 am EDT, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth.
According to the NASA press release, approximately 10 days ago, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and is expected to take 75,000 images for its mission over the next year, including approximately 1,200 over the next three days. Looking forward to seeing more of these…
Icepicks and Nukes 