Gerald Cecil, Dmitry Rashkeev (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

(Submitted on 1 Aug 2007)

Full paper with images and map (PDF)

More than 60,000 images of Mercury were taken at ~29 deg elevation during two sunrises, at 820 nm, and through a 1.35 m diameter off-axis aperture on the SOAR telescope. The sharpest resolve 0.2" (140 km) and cover 190-300 deg longitude -- a swath unseen by the Mariner 10 spacecraft -- at complementary phase angles to previous ground-based optical imagery. Our view is comparable to that of the Moon through weak binoculars. Evident are the large crater Mozart shadowed on the terminator, fresh rayed craters, and other albedo features keyed to topography and radar reflectivity, including the putative huge ``Basin S'' on the limb. Classical bright feature Liguria resolves across the northwest boundary of the Caloris basin into a bright splotch centered on a sharp, 20 km diameter radar crater, and is the brightest feature within a prominent darker ``cap'' (Hermean feature Solitudo Phoenicis) that covers much of the northern hemisphere between longitudes 80-250 deg. The cap may result from space weathering that darkens via a magnetically enhanced flux of the solar wind, or that reddens low latitudes via high solar insolation.

Comments:

7 pages, 4 PDF figures, pdfLaTeX, scheduled for Nov. Astronomical Journal

Subjects:

Astrophysics (astro-ph)

Cite as:

arXiv:0708.0146v1 [astro-ph]
Submission history
From: Gerald Cecil

[v1] Wed, 1 Aug 2007 13:13:48 GMT (872kb,D)

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