Messenger from Mercury

Orbiter returns images of odd landforms on innermost planet

Hot and heavy little Mercury is warming up to NASA’s MESSENGER probe and revealing its true planetary colors — in enhanced-color images. Among the spacecraft’s finds are bizarre landforms (shown here in blue) tucked inside impact craters on the planet’s surface.

PLANET POCKMARKS Irregular hollows on Mercury’s surface appear as odd blue pockmarks in this enhanced-color image from MESSENGER.