17 February 2026

MESSENGER Mission to Mercury

An artist's concept shows the MESSENGER spacecraft in orbit around Mercury. NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury March 17, becoming the first spacecraft to ever do so. Photo: NASA.
First Image Ever Obtained from Mercury Orbit. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's innermost planet. Photo: NASA.
Bright rays, consisting of impact ejecta and secondary craters, spread across this NAC image and radiate from Debussy crater, located at the top. The image, acquired during the first orbit for which MDIS was imaging, shows just a small portion of Debussy's large system of rays in greater detail than ever previously seen. Photo: NASA.
MESSENGER's Wide-Angle Camera. In this image the 1000 nm, 750 nm, and 430 nm filters are displayed in red, green, and blue, respectively. Several craters appear to have excavated compositionally distinct low-reflectance (brown-blue in this color scheme) material, and the bright rays of Hokusai crater to the north cross the image. Photo: NASA.
This NAC (Narrow Angle Camera) image shows an amazing new view of Machaut taken during MESSENGER’s second flyby of Mercury on Oct. 6, 2008. Photo: NASA.
About 58 minutes before MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury on Oct. 6, 2008, the Narrow Angle Camera captured this close-up image of a portion of Mercury’s surface -- imaged by spacecraft for the first time during this flyby. Photo: NASA.
This Wide Angle Camera image was acquired 9 minutes and 14 seconds after MESSENGER’s closest approach to Mercury on its second flyby, when the spacecraft was moving at 6.1 kilometers/second (3.8 miles/second). The image, centered at about 2.4ºS, 290ºE, is one in a sequence of 55: a five-frame mosaic with each frame in the mosaic acquired in all 11 of the WAC filters. Photo: NASA.
On Oct. 6, 2008, at 4:40 a.m. ET, MESSENGER successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury. The spectacular image shown here is one of the first to be returned and shows a WAC image of the departing planet taken about 90 minutes after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Mercury. Photo: NASA.
As the MESSENGER team continues to study the high-resolution images taken during the Mercury flyby encounter on January 14, 2008, scarps (cliffs) that extend for long distances are discovered. This frame, taken by the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), shows a region of Mercury's surface previously unseen by spacecraft and a large scarp crossing vertically through the scene, on the far right of the image. Photo: NASA.
As NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft drew closer to Mercury for its historic first flyby, the spacecraft acquired this image showing a variety of surface textures, including smooth plains at the center of the image, numerous impact craters and rough material that appears to have been ejected from the large crater to the lower right. Photo: NASA.
Mercury in colour. The color image was generated by combining three separate images taken through WAC filters sensitive to light in different wavelengths; filters that transmit light with wavelengths of 1000, 700, and 430 nanometers (infrared, far red, and violet, respectively) were placed in the red, green, and blue channels, respectively, to create this image. Photo: NASA.