First image of Mercury from orbit released

GREENBELT, Md., March 29 (UPI) -- NASA released the first photographs of the planet Mercury taken by its orbiting Messenger spacecraft, showing a landscape covered with craters, officials said.

The photo, snapped at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, shows a gray landscape of the southern portion of the planet with a view dominated by a 53-mile-wide impact crater, SPACE.com reported.

In 6 hours of observation from orbit, Messenger took 362 photographs of Mercury, many of previously unseen areas of the planet.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is overseeing the flight for NASA, posted the first image on its Messenger mission Web site.

"This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system's innermost planet," Messenger mission scientists said in a statement.

The spacecraft arrived at Mercury March 17 after a trip lasting more than 6 1/2 years and is expected to spend at least one Earth year studying the planet from orbit.