SAN FRANCISCO – The first ever global map of Mercury was released here Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting.

The map combines new observations from the Messenger spacecraft with earlier images captured by Mariner 10 in the 1970s.

Messenger completed the last of its three flybys of the planet on September 29th. The release of the map marks a new phase of the mission for the spacecraft, which will now orbit the sun's innermost planet for a year.

The U.S. Geological Survey built the map from 917 images of variable resolution and lighting conditions, but sophisticated software was able to match up planetary features from different images to create the near seamless mosaic.

*Citation: AGU Poster. "Near Global Mosaic of Mercury" by K. J. Becker; M. S. Robinson; T. L. Becker; L. A. Weller; S. Turner; L. Nguyen; C. Selby; B. W. Denevi; S. L. Murchie; R. L. McNutt; S. C. Solomon.

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*Image: USGS. Large, Extra Large, and Ridiculously Huge version of this image available at the USGS Astrogeology Center. *

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