Astrogeology

This mosaic represents the best geodetic map of Mercury's surface to date. MESSENGER's three flybys alone provide 90.90% of the data in the global mosaic (see Table above). Although MESSENGER went in to safe mode during the third flyby, the approach imaging was acquired and contributes ~6.82% additional coverage from earlier versions. Only the poles remain to be imaged, some of which...

This page introduces the Kaguya Multiband Imager derived spectral and derived mineral maps by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the University of Hawaii. The mosaics were created from topographically-corrected MI reflectance data acquired by the JAXA SELENE/Kaguya mission (see Ohtake et al., 2013) from the Kaguya Archive MI MAP processing level version 2 (MI MAP_02) products.

New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006 as part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program. The spacecraft will help scientists back on Earth study the surface and atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto, its moons and objects in the Kuiper belt—a region of our solar system beyond Neptune containing tens of thousands of objects. The USGS Astrogeology Science Center is committed to NASA’s New Horizons mission. 

In the early 1970s, specialized cameras onboard the Command Modules of the last three Apollo missions (15, 16, 17) photographed nearly 25% of the Moon in stunning detail. Today, scientists from Flagstaff’s U.S. Geological Survey, Arizona State University, and NASA are working together to reconstruct the lunar surface from these nearly 50-year-old photographs.

This product is a global thermal inertia mosaic of Mars generated from high-resolution Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) nighttime infrared images (Christensen et al., 2004; Fergason et al., 2006a) that allows the identification, assessment, and global correlation of martian surface materials. The higher spatial resolution of THEMIS data (100 m per pixel), relative to Thermal Emission...