NASAのインスタグラム(nasa) - 5月1日 06時07分

Today at 3:26 p.m. EDT, a new crater was created on this region of Mercury's surface when our MESSENGER spacecraft slammed into the planet at about 8,750 mph! Among its many accomplishments, the MESSENGER mission determined Mercury's surface composition, revealed its geological history, discovered its internal magnetic field is offset from the planet's center, and verified its polar deposits are dominantly water ice.

The large, 400-kilometer-diameter (250-mile-diameter), impact basin "Shakespeare" occupies the bottom left quarter of this image, acquired by the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) and Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) instruments aboard the spacecraft. The image is coded by topography. The tallest regions are colored red and are roughly 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) higher than low-lying areas such as the floors of impact craters, colored blue. The large crater on the left side of the image is "Janacek," with a diameter of 48 kilometers (30 miles). The Shakespeare impact basin is filled with smooth plains material, likely due to extensive lava flooding in the past. As of 24 hours before the impact, the current best estimates predict that the spacecraft will strike a ridge slightly to the northeast of Shakespeare. View this image to see more details of the predicted impact site and time.

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

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