mercury drops
rolling through palms
faster than setting
summer stars
whose ancestors shed
the iron in our blood
follow the electrons
to noble gasses
follow the moon-eyed
smiler to his treasure
peel back the asphalt
by the factory
find mercury balls
rolling marbles
in our soft
and willing hands
This is the first image ever taken from orbit around Mercury. Pretty cool, right? The image comes from NASA’s MESSENGER. NASA had this to say on its image of the day page:
At 5:20 am EDT on Mar. 29, 2011, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. The MESSENGER team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down.
Phil at Bad Astronomy has more including the name of that big crater, Debussy.