MESSENGER: Craters With Dark Halos On Mercury

MERCURY RISING

The crater with associated dark material in the lower-left part of this image is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) in diameter, and the crater with patches of dark material in the upper right is about 70 kilometers (40 miles) across.

by Staff Writers
Laurel MD (SPX) Feb 25, 2008
As MESSENGER flew by Mercury on January 14, 2008, the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) captured this view. Two of the larger craters in this image appear to have darkened crater rims and partial "halos" of dark material immediately surrounding the craters.

Both craters appear to have nearly complete rims and interior terraced walls, suggesting that they formed more recently than the other nearby shallower craters of similar size.

There are two possible explanations for their dark halos:

1/ Darker subsurface material may have been excavated during the explosions from the asteroid or comet impacts that produced the craters.

2/ Large cratering explosions may have melted a fraction of the rocky surface material involved in the explosions, splashing so-called "impact melts" across the surface; such melted rock is often darker (lower albedo) than the pre-impact target material.

In either case, the association of the dark material with relatively recently formed craters suggests that the processes that gradually homogenize Mercury's surface materials have not yet had time to reduce the contrast of these dark halos.

These dark-halo craters, located near Mercury's south pole, are also visible in the previously released false-color image created from three Wide Angle Camera (WAC) frames.

Information from images taken in the 11 different color filters of the WAC will help MESSENGER scientists understand the nature of the dark material associated with the craters shown in this image and will determine whether they reveal the presence of subsurface material of a different composition, are examples of impact melt, or perhaps have some other explanation.

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MERCURY RISING

Messenger Team Begins Planning For Second Mercury Encounter

Pasadena CA (JPL) Feb 08, 2008
Little more than three weeks after Messenger's first historic flyby of Mercury, the team this week began mapping out its trajectory and observation plans for the probe's second pass of the planet this fall. On October 6, 2008, at 4:39 a.m. EST, the spacecraft will once again fly 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the surface of the planet.

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