Gorgeous new Mercury maps showcase planet's striking features

A stunning digital model of Mercury unveils the planet's striking landscape, while other new maps provide a closer look at the shadowed northern pole and reveal the highest and lowest points on the closest planet to the sun. Built with data from NASA's MESSENGER mission that orbited Mercury for four years, the new maps offer a bounty of scientific insight, while also delivering an incredible view of the planet.

"The wealth of these data, greatly enhanced by the extension of MESSENGER's primary one-year orbital mission to more than four years, has already enabled and will continue to enable exciting scientific discoveries about Mercury for decades to come," Susan Ensor, a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and manager of the MESSENGER Science Operations Center, said in a statement.

This first-ever global digital-elevation model (DEM) of Mercury combines more than 10,000 images acquired by the spacecraft to take viewers across the wide-open spaces of the tiny world. The animation reveals the planet's highest and lowest points. The highest is found just south of Mercury's equator, sitting 2.78 miles (4.48 kilometers) above the average elevation of the planet. The lowest point resides in Rachmaninoff basin, the suspected home of some of the most recent volcanic activity on the planet, and lies 3.34 miles (5.38 km) below the landscape average.

Another new map released by NASA probes the northern poles, where the sun usually sits low on the horizon and shadows run long. MESSENGER discovered that volcanic activity in the past buried the northern region beneath lava as much as a mile deep, spanning an area about two-thirds the size of the continental United States. MESSENGER's Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument captured photos when filters could best minimize the shadows, revealing the northern volcanic plains in a wealth of color.