NASA / JHUAPL / CIW

A June 3 image from NASA's Messenger probe shows a scene in Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of Magritte Crater. Three overlapping craters form the head and ears of a "Mickey Mouse" shape.

We've had the Face on Mars, the Smiley Face on Mars, even the Elephant Face on Mars — and now we've got the Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury, courtesy of NASA's Messenger probe.

The mousy shape comes from three overlapping craters in Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of a larger crater known as Magritte. The biggest crater in this scene, which serves as Mickey's head, measures about 65 miles (105 kilometers) across.

This picture was taken during Messenger's extended mission, with the aim of collecting imagery when the sun is near the horizon. Such conditions produce long shadows that highlight small-scale surface features. The result is that the Mercury mission's mapmakers get a better sense of the lay of the land.

Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury back in March 2011, and the end of its one-year primary mapping mission marked the beginning of a one-year extension. Which means we may be hearing more about Mickey, Magritte and their Mercurial friends for months or years to come.

Where in the Cosmos
The Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury was today's featured image for our "Where in the Cosmos" Facebook contest. It took just a couple of minutes for Leslie Kebschull and Brad Perdew to come up with the locale for the cartoonish craters. Their entries came in just three seconds apart. To reward their quick minds and fingers, I'm sending them a pair of 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

To get in on next week's contest, click the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page. And while you're at it, sign up for the Tech/Science email newsletter, which is sent out Monday through Friday. That's a great way to get your daily dose of Cosmic Log as well as other goodies from msnbc.com's Space and Science sections.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA

A stereo image from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, based on data acquired in 2004, shows the shield volcano known as Tharsis Tholus. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect.

NASA's 3-D video of the asteroid Vesta is a stunner, but there are other places you can go in the solar system using red-blue glasses.

Take Mars, for example: Last month the European Space Agency released pictures of the semi-gigantic Tharsis Tholus volcano, which rises 5 miles (8 kilometers) above the Martian surface and spans 75 miles.

G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA

This image of the 5-mile-high Martian shield volcano known as Tharsis Tholus is color-coded to reflect elevation. The lowest elevations are in green, violet and purple. The highest elevations are in red and brown.

It's no Olympus Mons, which is 16 miles high and as big as the state of Arizona, but it's big nevertheless.

The stereo image from ESA's Mars Express orbiter looks right down the wide throat of Tharsis Tholus' caldera. ESA notes that at least two sections have collapsed around the volcano's eastern and western flanks during 4 billion years of geological history, leaving behind scarps that are several miles high.

The color-coded elevation map at right provides another way to get a sense of the terrain, but you can't beat 3-D glasses for giving you the sense that you're hanging right over the caldera's 20-mile-wide maw.

Stuart Atkinson, an educator and amateur astronomer from Britain, has mastered the trick of producing 3-D imagery from NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars, and he regularly posts pictures to his "Road to Endeavour" website. In last week's status report on Opportunity's progress, Atkinson shared several red-blues, including the vista shown below.

S. Atkinson / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell

Ridges rise up in this Martian vista, seen by NASA's Opportunity rover as it studies Endeavour Crater.

Here's what Atkinson says about the picture:

"Just imagine you’re there. ... Imagine you’re slogging up that ridge in your heavy, bulky spacesuit, with your ragged, exhausted breathing rasping in your helmet. ... Eventually you reach the top of the ridge and pause for breath, hands on your knees, bent over. ... When you look up you find yourself looking down at the floor of Endeavour, at the dark dust dunes rippled across it, at the waves of wind wafting gently over it. ... Then you lift your eyes and see, on the far side of the great crater, the eastern hills, shining orange and gold in the sunlight. ...

"People will actually do that for real one day.

"How I envy them."

Me too.

Mercury was another target for stereo pictures, this time taken by NASA's Messenger probe. The picture below is a red-blue combination showing the floor of 19-mile-wide Kertesz Crater. Messenger acquired the image data in July, but the photo was released last month. The floor of the crater is covered with the "hollows" that made headlines during a recent Messenger science briefing, and the 3-D effect gives the imagery an extra dimension.

NASA / JHUAPL / CIW

This is an anaglyph created from two images of Mercury's Kertesz Crater. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect. With this anaglyph, better results may be achieved by tilting the head slightly to the left.

How to see in 3-D
By now you're probably wondering where to get the red-blue glasses you need to see the 3-D effect. Inexpensive cardboard spectacles are generally inserted in 3-D books or DVD packages — but for the pictures that you see on this page and on most other websites, you'll want to make sure you have the red-blue (or red-cyan) filters rather than amber-blue or green-magenta filters.

The red-blue glasses may be available at novelty shops, and you can also order them online. Here's a list of vendors from NASA. In addition to the outlets on NASA's list, there's Amazon.com and 3DGlasses.net. NASA even provides instructions for making your own 3-D glasses.

Today I gave away free 3-D glasses to the first 10 folks to go to the Cosmic Log Facebook page and post a comment specifically asking for them.  Don't worry, there'll be another 3-D giveaway once I scrounge up some more of the cardboard glasses. The red-blue specs are provided courtesy of Microsoft Research, which includes 3-D imagery in its WorldWide Telescope astronomy software. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

Once you have your glasses, click through these links to sample more 3-D goodies from outer space:

• Take a wild ride over Vesta in 3-D
• NASA's past and future in 3-D
• See the asteroid Vesta in 3-D
• See the ultimate space shot in 3-D
• Explore the 3-D depths of Mars
• Get a fresh 3-D look at Phobos
• See a Martian crater in 3-D
• See a Martian milestone in 3-D
• See the Martian arctic in 3-D
• See more depths of Mars in 3-D
• 3-D delights from Mars
• Still more from Mars in 3-D
• Go on a space mission in 3-D
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D
• Saturn's moons in 3-D
• More from outer space in 3-D
• Fly through a nebula in 3-D
• Cosmic Log's 3-D-O-Rama

Last updated 11:50 p.m. ET.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

When you look back at the past 50 years of human spaceflight, don't forget the computer scientists who helped make it all possible.

That's the message Arthur Cohen wants to pass along on the golden anniversary of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard's 1961 Freedom 7 spaceflight, a 15-minute suborbital outing that marked one not-so-small step on the way to the moon. The successful flights made by Shepard and other members of the Mercury 7 depended on the work done by Cohen and thousands of other workers behind the scenes.

"There was a lot of attention given to the seven astronauts," Cohen recalled in an interview this week. "The thing that was hardly mentioned was the fact that there were computers that were doing the work."

Today, Cohen is an adjunct professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College in New York, but back in the early 1960s he was manager for the IBM Space Computer Center in Washington, where he directed the development of all computing support for Project Mercury. Two IBM 7090 computer systems at NASA's nearby Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, plus a backup IBM 709 computer in the Bahamas, provided all the raw number-crunching power to plot the trajectories of those early spacecraft. Western Electric and Bell Labs provided the supporting communication network.

"In those days, 1,000 bits per second was high speed," the 83-year-old Cohen told me.

The data streaming down from space was funneled through Goddard and then onward to Cape Canaveral, where mission controllers kept watch on the real-time channel. "All the displays at the Cape were actually provided by us," Cohen said. Somewhere around 75 to 100 people were on IBM's team to make sure the computers were in sync.

A picture from the old days shows Cohen and members of his team gathered around the computer center, with Mercury astronauts Deke Slayton and Gus Grissom in their midst. "We did wear white shirts — that's the way IBM was back then, right? — but maybe our sleeves were rolled up," Cohen joked.

IBM

The IBM computer team mixes it up with Mercury astronauts Gus Grissom (fifth from the right) and Deke Slayton (second from the right). Arthur Cohen is fourth from the left.

After Project Mercury, Cohen turned to other, more down-to-Earth projects at IBM in New York, and retired from the company in 1988. But he says the spaceflight experience set the tone for his career and those of a whole generation of engineers. "The people who worked on the project did go on to Gemini and Apollo, and some of the people went on to the airline reservation system. One of my guys went on to the air traffic control system and managed that.," he said. "There was a lot of fallout from this stuff."

IBM

Arthur Cohen is now an adjunct professor of mathematics at Nassau Community College.

Today, almost everything about spaceflight and its computing requirements is different.

"Things have improved, but it's basically the same kind of stuff. You still have to check data, edit data, smooth data," he said. "You're still driving displays. But I think the space game is going to be much more about understanding something about deep space. It'll be a different challenge. Here, you're talking about doing an orbit in 88 minutes. There, you may be talking about years [of orbital calculations], so things may be going somewhat slower in terms of feedback about what's happening."

Despite all those diferences, Cohen suspects that the level of dedication among computer scientists will be as high as ever.

"The future for them can't be any brighter," he said. "Computers are going to be behind everything that can help mankind, whether it be medicine, or crop yields, or space. Whatever it might be, computers are going to be important. Who knows what we need to do?"

To learn more about Cohen and the contributions made by Project Mercury's "unsung computers," check out IBM's news release and this report from the DVICE blog. Do you have some behind-the-scenes stories about the past 50 years of spaceflight? If so, feel free to share your tales in the comment section below.

More on spaceflight history:

• Timeline: Glory Days on the Final Frontier
• Slideshow: Remembering Alan Shepard
• NASA celebrates 50 years of Americans in space
• Historic Mercury launch pad reimagined as classroom

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

NASA / JHUAPL / CIW

The first image sent back to Earth from Mercury orbit shows a rayed crater known as Debussy and a smaller crater with unusual dark rays, called Matabei. The picture was transmitted to Earth by NASA's Messenger spacecraft.

Last updated 3:40 p.m. ET March 30:

NASA's Messenger mission unveiled the first picture of the planet Mercury taken by an orbiting spacecraft on Tuesday, and promised to provide more goodies in the days and months to come.

The picture shows a wide region of Mercury's southern hemisphere, including the south pole and a wedge of the planet that has never been photographed close-up before. But you'd probably be forgiven if you wondered whether the Messenger probe was orbiting the moon rather than Mercury: The monochromatic, heavily cratered terrain looks a lot like the lunar surface.

Here's a description of the scene from Messenger's science team:

"The dominant rayed crater in the upper portion of the image is Debussy. The smaller crater Matabei with its unusual dark rays is visible to the west of Debussy. The bottom portion of this image is near Mercury's south pole and includes a region of Mercury's surface not previously seen by spacecraft. Compare this image to the planned image footprint [displayed below] to see the region of newly imaged terrain, south of Debussy."

NASA / JHUAPL / CIW

The yellow square on this mosaic image shows the planned footprint for the first image to be acquired by a spacecraft orbiting Mercury. The dark area represents a region of the planet that has not previously been seen by spacecraft.

Messenger's science team is already familiar with most of Mercury's terrain. The $446 million mission got under way in 2004, and the desk-sized probe zoomed past Mercury in 2008 (twice!) and in 2009. At its closest, Messenger came within 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the surface, which is much closer than the distance from which today's picture was taken (about 9,500 miles or 15,000 kilometers).

But Messenger (whose name comes from the acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) wasn't in orbit back then. It was just passing through. The probe finally entered orbit around Mercury on March 17 and is now going through its commissioning phase.

The Messenger mission's principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in a news release that he and his colleagues were "thrilled that the spacecraft and instrument checkout has been proceeding according to plan":

"The first images from orbit and the first measurements from Messenger's other payload instruments are only the opening trickle of the flood of new information that we can expect over the coming year. The orbital exploration of the solar system’s innermost planet has begun."

Today's picture, snapped at 5:20 a.m. ET, was the first of 364 images that were acquired during a span of six hours and sent back to Earth, Messenger's mission team said. More than 1,000 images are due to be taken during the probe's checkout. During Messenger's yearlong science campaign, more than 75,000 pictures are to be sent back.

Mercury has been studied during flybys before, most notably by Mariner 10 in 1974-75, but Messenger is the first spacecraft to orbit the solar system's innermost planet. It's also the densest planet, as well as the planet with the largest daily variations in surface temperature.

Just how big is Mercury's metal-rich core? Do deep, permanently shadowed craters at the planet's poles contain ice? What does its atmosphere (or "exosphere") contain? Why does Mercury have a global magnetic field, while Venus and Mars do not? Messenger's team plans to address all those questions in the year ahead. Some of them may even be addressed on Wednesday, when team leaders are due to discuss Messenger's first images at 2 p.m. ET during a NASA teleconference. Stay tuned for updates after the scientists have had their say. 

Update for 3:40 p.m. March 30: Still more pictures were released on Wednesday, as promised. Check out this Photoblog gallery featuring three of the best images, and check back later for still more about the successful start of Messenger's orbital mission.  

More about Mercury:

• 10 surprising facts about Messenger
• Is Mercury an incredible shrinking planet?
• Mercury just might hit us someday
• Interactive: The new solar system

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." And if you want to stay on my good side, don't ever call Mercury the "smallest planet."