The television cameras of Mariner 10 are turned on when the probe is still several hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from the objective: Mercury, only half of which is illuminated by the Sun, appears like a small, half moon. Everthing is working to perfection and the wait to see close-ups of the surface is unbearable. Finally, on March 29th, the probe reaches the closest distance from the planet: just 720 kilometers away. The photos transmitted to Earth are exceptionally clear and reveal surprising details: craters, basins, areas with surface fractures, wide plains - a landscape that is similar to the Moon. The astronomers are enthusiastic and when Mariner 10 passes near Mercury again two more times, on September 21st of the same year and March 16th of the following year, they will have taken no less than 6 000 photographs that form a mosaic of 40% of the planet's surface. This extraordinary mission, involving the passage near Venus and three passes over Mercury - a real masterpiece of space ballistics -, will provide them with material to study for years to come. But, now let's look at some of the discoveries from the Mariner probe.
The television cameras of Mariner 10 are turned on when the probe is still several hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from the objective: Mercury, only half of which is illuminated by the Sun, appears like a small, half moon. Everthing is working to perfection and the wait to see close-ups of the surface is unbearable. Finally, on March 29th, the probe reaches the closest distance from the planet: just 720 kilometers away. The photos transmitted to Earth are exceptionally clear and reveal surprising details: craters, basins, areas with surface fractures, wide plains - a landscape that is similar to the Moon. The astronomers are enthusiastic and when Mariner 10 passes near Mercury again two more times, on September 21st of the same year and March 16th of the following year, they will have taken no less than 6 000 photographs that form a mosaic of 40% of the planet's surface. This extraordinary mission, involving the passage near Venus and three passes over Mercury - a real masterpiece of space ballistics -, will provide them with material to study for years to come. But, now let's look at some of the discoveries from the Mariner probe.
