Other
Scientific paper
Sep 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.5101c&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #51.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.489
Other
Scientific paper
MESSENGER's first flyby of Mercury in January 2008 provided excellent imaging of a sector never before imaged by spacecraft (including the entire Caloris basin); also imaged, but under much better lighting conditions, were regions originally seen by Mariner 10. We have studied the spatial densities, size-frequency distributions (SFDs), and other attributes of craters revealed in Narrow Angle Camera images. We find that the spatial density of craters in the annulus of smooth plains surrounding Caloris is less than on the plains within Caloris, implying that they were formed over a significant duration after Caloris formed. This suggests a predominantly volcanic origin for the plains, consistent with other evidence for volcanism in MESSENGER's images.
We find an unexpectedly prominent contribution to Mercury's SFD for diameters less than 10 km by well-preserved secondary craters from large craters and basins. One source of secondary craters in the newly imaged region is the double-ring (peak-ring) basin Raditladi, which exhibits a surprising dearth of small craters on its interior plains and ejecta blanket, indicating a very young relative (and perhaps absolute) age.
The crater SFD in the most heavily cratered regions of the newly imaged portion of Mercury is similar to the average highlands SFD found from Mariner 10 images. One attribute of this SFD is a relative lack of craters 10 to 40 km in diameter compared with lunar highlands; those craters may have been removed by formation of intercrater plains, which are more widespread on Mercury than on the Moon. However, highlands SFDs determined from our better images of regions previously imaged by Mariner 10 show wide variations in the 10 to 40 km range, which may be due to heterogeneity in the distribution of intercrater plains, due to spatially varying clusters of very large basin secondaries, or both.
Chapman Clark R.
Head James W. III
Merline William Jon
Solomon Stanley C.
Strom Richard G.
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