An interactive globe of the innermost planet, textured with the MESSENGER MDIS enhanced-colour mosaic and optionally displaced by the global stereo DEM. Named features — impact basins, lobate scarps, radar-bright polar craters — are selectable; the research feed is retrieved at run time.
The sphere is rendered in Three.js at Mercury's mean radius, 2439.4 km (IAU 2015), scaled to scene units. The base layer is the MESSENGER MDIS enhanced-colour global mosaic at 665 m/px, a principal-component composite of the eight-filter wide-angle base map that stretches spectral contrast between high-reflectance plains, low-reflectance material excavated from depth and pyroclastic deposits. Relief is a vertex displacement driven by the global DEM v2, whose elevations span −5.38 to +4.48 km about the 2439.4 km datum, a dynamic range of 9.86 km or 0.4 % of the radius; the exaggeration control scales it. With relief disabled, the same DEM supplies a bump map, and an Elevation overlay renders it as a hypsometric choropleth. Textures are read from Maps/textures/mercury_color_*.jpg and Data/worlds/mercury/layers/.
Named features are drawn from the USGS/IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature via Data/worlds/mercury/features.json: impact basins (Caloris, Rembrandt), smooth plains, the lobate thrust scarps recording global contraction, and the radar-bright polar craters. The research panel queries body_server.py at /api/mercury/latest for current Mercury literature (NASA ADS, with arXiv as fallback); a per-feature endpoint returns recent papers on the selected feature. Absent a server, the seed research.json and ADS search links are substituted. Engine, server and schema are shared with the Moon globe.
Markers use the east-positive convention of the MDIS mosaic and DEM (image left edge = 180°W, increasing east); gazetteer coordinates for Mercury are published west-positive and are converted on ingest. Caloris Planitia (30.5°N, 170.2°E) and the rayed crater Hokusai (57.8°N, 17.1°E) are used as registration checks. A single longitude-offset constant accommodates a mosaic centred differently.
Mercury is highlighted in cyan on a live map of the uniquely-named solar-system bodies — planets, dwarf planets, named asteroids and comets — with the interstellar objects and escaping spacecraft, each at its current position and linked to its source.
body_server.py