NASA MESSENGER Image: Crater Beckett

This image from MESSENGER’s orbit around Mercury shows the pit-floor crater Beckett. Beckett is a 53-km diameter impact crater that was viewed during MESSENGER’s first flyby of the planet, and an image collected then revealed the curved pit on Beckett’s floor. The new image shown here has higher spatial resolution, allowing finer details of the pit’s interior to be discerned.

This image was acquired as part of MDIS’s high-resolution surface morphology base map. The surface morphology base map will cover more than 90% of Mercury’s surface with an average resolution of 250 meters/pixel (0.16 miles/pixel or 820 feet/pixel). Images acquired for the surface morphology base map typically have off-vertical Sun angles (i.e., high incidence angles) and visible shadows so as to reveal clearly the topographic form of geologic features.

The MESSENGER spacecraft is the first ever to orbit the planet Mercury, and the spacecraft’s seven scientific instruments and radio science investigation are unraveling the history and evolution of the Solar System’s innermost planet. Visit the Why Mercury? section of this website to learn more about the key science questions that the MESSENGER mission is addressing. During the one-year primary mission, MDIS is scheduled to acquire more than 75,000 images in support of MESSENGER’s science goals.

Date acquired: June 12, 2011 Image Mission Elapsed Time (MET): 216331093 Image ID: 368347 Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) Center Latitude: -40.08° Center Longitude: 111.5° E Resolution: 186 meters/pixel Scale:The edges of this image are about 93 km (58 mi.) long. Incidence Angle: 73.8° Emission Angle: 2.8° Phase Angle: 76.6°Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington. More images.