Want to take a hike on Mercury?
On Friday — about one year after the Messenger spacecraft ended its mission by crashing into Mercury — scientists released the first complete global elevation map produced by the long-lived spacecraft.
The new map, which looks somewhat like a map a hiker would use, shows the highest and lowest points on the planet, with its highest point coming in at 4.48 kilometers above the average elevation on the planet, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), said in a statement.
The planet’s lowest point is 5.38 km below the average in the Rachmaninoff basin. Read more…
