Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science is another shot of Mercury from the Mercury Messenger. The Planetary Society has an awesome blog where they describe this shot:

MESSENGER took this photo of Mercury as it departed from its first flyby at 19:59:41 on January 14, 2008 UTC. The image contains two craters with dark halos, which may indicate that Mercury's surface is layered, with different compositions at different depths. Alternatively, the dark halos could represent deposits of material that was melted during the impact; such materials are often darker in color than unmelted rock.

Very cool. I'm really looking forward to when Messenger parks itself in orbit around Mercury on March 18, 2011.