The MESSENGER spacecraft has been zipping around the Sun on its very circuitous route to Mercury since its launch in August 2004. It made its first flyby of Mercury two days ago, snapping high resolution images of a hemisphere of the planet that has never been observed by a spacecraft. The only previous spacecraft flybys of Mercury were made by Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975. Not surprisingly, this hemisphere looks pretty much like the other, at least at first blush. It is also quite similar in appearance to the heavily cratered lunar highlands. This is all consistent with Mercury being a geologically dead world. A lot of the interest in Mercury centers around its magnetic field and the material knocked off the surface in the harsh environment so close to the Sun. MESSENGER is equipped with instruments to study all of this. It has two more flybys of Mercury this year and next and doesn’t actually go into orbit until March 2011. These flybys are all to lose enough energy so that it can go into orbit around the relatively tiny planet with the fuel available.