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NASA's Mercury Messenger passed within 200km of the planet on Monday collecting about 1,200 new images. On Oct. 6, 2008, at roughly 4:40 a.m. ET, Messenger flew by Mercury for the second time this year, according to NASA.NASA officials said the flyby also gave Messenger the gravity tug it needed to get on to the right path to go into orbit in 2011."The Messenger team is extremely pleased by the superb performance of the spacecraft and the payload," said chief scientist Sean Solomon...

When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975, the probe imaged less than half the planet. In January, during MESSENGER's first flyby, its cameras returned images of about 20 percent of the planet's surface missed by Mariner 10. Yesterday, at 4:40 am EDT, MESSENGER successfully completed its second flyby of Mercury, and its cameras captured more than 1,200 high-resolution and color images of the planet "“ unveiling another 30 percent of Mercury's surface that had never...