Reunion with Mercury.

After nearly 33 years a spacecraft has returned to Mercury. Click here to see the full story in sky and telescope magazine.
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Above is the first image taken of Mercury by the Messenger spacecraft. This was taken with its wide angle camera on its closet approach, at 200 kilometers(124 miles) above the surface, on January 14,08. You can see this full story at nasa's website which can be found here.
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NASA Science News for January 21, 2008

Last week's historic flyby of Mercury by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft gathered 500 megabytes of data and more than a thousand high-resolution photos covering nearly six million square miles of previously unseen terrain. "Discoveries are at hand," say members of the mission science team. Read today's story for a hint of things to come.

FULL STORY


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NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has beamed back some surprising new data from the planet Mercury. Highlights include a weird crater nicknamed "the Spider," a planetary tail of hydrogen atoms, and measurements that show giant Caloris basin is even bigger than researchers imagined.

FULL STORY
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Thanks Misfit, great story.
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