Thanks to Google teaming up with the MESSENGER scientists, we can now Google explore Mercury as we do Mars and the Moon.  As more information becomes available, the experience will become more and more like standing on the surface of Mercury.  The MESSENGER website gives this information:

Three Easy Steps to Explore Mercury in Google Earth

1. Download Google Earth
2. Click HERE to open the Mercury KMZ File in Google Earth
3. Explore!

Alternatively you can right-click HERE and choose “Save link as …” to download the file. Launch the Google Earth Application and Open the Mercury KMZ File in Google Earth

Some Useful Tips:

• Turn off all the layers related to Earth in the lower left corner
• Turn off the Atmosphere under the View menu at the top
• Under Places in the upper left corner, make sure the Mercury Dataset and the Featured Data are both selected
• Named craters and other features on Mercury are marked by a circular marker
• Featured MESSENGER images are marked by a small picture of the spacecraft
• Click on either named features or MESSENGER images for more information

Also in the news at the MESSENGER website:

Yesterday the MESSENGER spacecraft successfully completed the first of four “hot seasons” expected to occur during its one-year primary mission in orbit about Mercury. During these hot seasons, the Sun-facing side of the probe’s sunshade can reach temperatures as high as 350°C.

These hot conditions are the result of two concurrent circumstances, says MESSENGER Mission Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “Mercury is in an eccentric orbit, and its distance from the Sun varies over 88 days, from 43,689,229 miles to 28,816,300 miles,” he explains. “On May 13, Mercury began heading closer to the Sun in its orbit. The planet reached its closest distance from the Sun on June 12.”

The second contributor to this heat is the geometry of MESSENGER’s orbit relative to the hot dayside of Mercury. The spacecraft is in a highly eccentric orbit around the planet, approaching to within 310 miles of the surface every 12 hours.

“During this hot period, the closest point of approach of the spacecraft to Mercury’s surface occurs on the sunlit side of the planet, so for almost one hour per orbit the spacecraft must pass between the Sun on one side and the hot dayside surface of the planet on the other,” Finnegan says. “To add further extremes, this season is also when the spacecraft passes over the nightside of the planet at high elevations and experiences the longest solar eclipses of the mission. During this period, when eclipses last as long as 62 minutes per orbit, the solar arrays are not illuminated and the spacecraft must derive its power from its internal battery.”