MESSENGER targeted-observation image of the interior of Eminescu crater
A recent image acquired by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft shows the interior of Eminescu, a youngish 130-km (80 mile) wide crater just north of Mercury’s equator. Eminescu made science headlines last year with MESSENGER’s discovery of curious eroded blotches called “hollows” scattered across its interior and surrounding its central peak, and now it looks like the spacecraft may have spotted some of these strange features in their earliest stages of formation along the inner edge of the crater’s rim.
First announced in September 2011, hollows have now been identified in many areas across Mercury. They had showed up in previous images as only bright spots, but once MESSENGER established orbit in March 2011 and began its high-resolution imaging of Mercury’s surface it soon became clear that these features were something totally new.
The lack of craters within hollows indicates that they are relatively young. It was suggested that they may be the result of an ongoing process on Mercury — a suggestion supported by this recent image, acquired on November 19, 2012.
It’s thought that hollows are formed by the solar wind constantly blasting Mercury’s surface, scouring away deposits of volatile materials in its crust that have been left exposed by impacts.
The image above shows an area about 42 km across. Read more on the MESSENGER mission site here.
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns…
Solar Sails are an enigmatic and majestic way to travel across the gulf of space.…
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been…
Well over 5,000 planets have been found orbiting other star systems. One of the satellites…
Over the last few years I have been renovating my home. Building on Earth seems…
Astrobiologists continue to work towards determining which biosignatures might be best to look for when…