The Urania Project

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Paint It Black: Mercury (NASA, MESSENGER, 01/23/12) (by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center)

<i>Via Flickr:</i>
This image shows two views of the crater Berkel on Mercury. The image on the left is a monochrome image obtained when the Sun was lower on the horizon than when the color image on the right was collected. As a result, the left image emphasizes the topography of the surface (due to the presence of shadowing), whereas the image on the right is dominated by inherent differences in reflectance and color. The impact that formed Berkel excavated dark subsurface material and deposited it around the crater’s rim. The presence of this low reflectance material causes the floor of the crater to appear black in the color image.

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

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