Courtesy of NASA. The surface of Mercury has numerous interesting features, including a variety of craters, ridges, and terrains ranging from heavily cratered to nearly crater free. These features, and their location across the known planet surface, helps us to understand the evolution of the planet.
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• Craters 9 – Like the Moon, the dominant surface feature on Mercury is craters. Furthermore, all craters on Mercury show the same morphological characteristics as their lunar counterparts. The smaller ones are all bowl-shaped, and with increasing size, they develop central peaks, terraced inner walls, secondary craters, and rays.
Oct 13, 2019 · Type: Multiple Choice Points Awarded: 1/1 Your Answer (s): Small and Hot. Small and hot. Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System and it also the closes planet to the Sun. Its radius size is only 2,439.7 km, which is just 1/3 the width of Earth. Therefore, we consider Mercury's size as small. With the temperature setting, since it is really close to the sun which is …
What are the dominant features on the surface of Mercury? a) large canyons cut by running water b) large dark burn marks because of the proximity to the Sun c) impact craters of various sizes d) pools of highly reflective liquid mercury Answer: c Section: 19.3
Apr 05, 2022 · The most dominant feature that you may notice on the surface of Mercury are impact craters - basins of lava formed out of some of these craters. One of the largest impact basins in the planet is the Caloris Basin, which is about 1300 km in diameter. In some of these craters, long rays of ridges extend outwards forming into rupes or escarpments.
Surface Features of Mercury. The surface of Mercury, at first glance, looks very much like that of the Moon, but in fact it is different in several ways. The MESSENGER spacecraft revealed that Mercury has some unique landforms, more smooth plains, and surface compositions (low in iron and high in sulfur) that are unlike any measured on the Moon.
Ridge and trough systems unique to Mercury have been observed in MESSENGER imagery. These features form in relation to "ghost craters," impact craters that are filled and buried by volcanic deposits, but whose outline is revealed by ridges that form over the crater rim. The patterns of the ridges and troughs are caused by extension and contraction due to cooling of very thick lava flows and the planet's interior.
The Rembrandt Basin displays a "wheel and spoke" pattern on its central floor that has never been seen on any other planet or moon. Image courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Smithsonian Institution/Carnegie Institution of Washington. Rembrandt. Rembrandt Size Comparison.
Discovery is about 550 kilometers (350 miles) long and up to 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) high. Notice that the walls and floors of two impact craters have been deformed by the thrust fault that formed the scarp. Image courtesy of T.R. Watters, M.S. Robinson, and A.C. Cook. Rupes.
Craters on Mercury are named after famous artists, authors, and musicians.) Image courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington. Hollows.
This is one of the largest impact basins in the solar system and the largest feature on Mercury. The Caloris Basin is 1300 kilometers (810 miles) in diameter. Only half of the basin was imaged by Mariner 10 in the 1970s, but the picture was completed by the MESSENGER mission. After the impact, the basin was flooded by lava.
Surface Features of Mercury. The surface of Mercury has numerous interesting features, including a variety of craters, ridges, and terrains ranging from heavily cratered to nearly crater free. These features, and their location across the known planet surface, helps us to understand the evolution of the planet.
Craters on Mercury are named mainly after artists , while plains have generally been named after mythological and religious figures. Several features are named after famous astonomers and observatories.
Several different types of craters can be seen, including young craters in otherwise smooth terrain, new craters on top of old craters, craters with peaks in the center, and craters with lines or "rays" of bright material pointing out from the central crater.
The following images illustrate three features from the surface of Mercury: a large impact basin called Caloris that is similar to large maria on the Moon (the dark feature centered on the left edge of the left image and outlined with dashed lines), jumbled surface features called "weird terrain," and a long cliff-like feature called a scarp (the almost vertical feature near the center of the right image and indicated by the arrow).
Generally, Mercury is heavily cratered but not as much as the Moon. In addition, although we expect that Mercury had a volcanic past, we find little of the evidence for past volcanism common on the Moon. (Though some newer analyses of the old Mariner 10 data suggest that some plains could be volcanic in origin.) These facts are not well understood, but suggest that the history of Mercury was not exactly the same as the history of the Moon, though they share many similarities.