WATCH: Beautiful 3D map of planet Mercury

Sunday, May 15, 2016, 10:44 AM - Though MESSENGER, NASA's probe sent to orbit the planet Mercury, plummeted to the planet's surface a year ago, scientists are still releasing data from the mission, and have come up with the gem above.

MESSENGER orbited Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, for four years until its demise on April 30, 2015 -- plenty of time to scan the planet's surface to come up with the spinning topographical map above, which is derived from 100,000 individual images.

Aside from the colour, highlights include Mercury's highest peak, at 4.48 km above the planet's average elevation (there is, of course, no sea level on on barren Mercury), and the lowest depth, around 5.38 km below the average.

NASA says the probe also helped peer into the mysteries of Mercury's north pole, where the sun's low position on the horizon meant long shadows obscured previous attempts at mapping "colour characteristics" of the rocks there.

"Consequently, [instruments aboard MESSENGER] carefully captured images of this portion of the planet when the shadows were minimized through five different narrow-band color filters," the agency said in a news release. "Mercury’s northern volcanic plains are revealed in striking color, as shown in the image below."

Image: NASA

Nancy Chobot, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) who was responsible for the imaging system aboard Mercury that captured these images, said the north pole had in the past been buried by lava as much as 1.6 km deep in some places.

"This has become one of my favorite maps of Mercury," Chabot added. "Now that it is available, I’m looking forward to it being used to investigate this epic volcanic event that shaped Mercury’s surface."

SOURCE: NASA