NASA spacecraft MESSENGER captures new images of Mercury

The planet Mercury is pictured on October 6, 2008, at 4:40 a.m. Eastern Time. NASA's spacecraft MESSENGER captured the images as it successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury. The bright crater just south of the center of the image is Kuiper, identified on images from the Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s. (UPI Photo/NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)