The picture was taken by Messenger Spacecraft. It was a NASA robotic spacecraft that orbited the planet Mercury between 2011 and 2015. The probe was launched aboard a Delta II rocket in August 2004.
The mission came to an end four years later on April 30, 2015, when the spacecraft exhausted its fuel and crashed on the planet. By the end of its survey, MESSENGER had collected more than 250,000 images, allowing scientists to produce the sharpest map of Mercury ever created.