Colourful View of Mercury Shot Glass

This design features an image of the planet Mercury. The colours seen are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but the colours are intended to enhance the chemical, mineralogical and physical differences between the various rocks that make up Mercury's surface. The data is based on imagery from NASA's MESSENGER space probe, which orbited the planet Mercury between 2011 and 2015. Mercury is the smallest and innermost planet in our Solar System; its full orbit around the Sun takes only around 88 Earth days.