Mercury's Cratered Surface and the "Paw Print" Target Name:   Mercury Spacecraft:   MESSENGER Produced by:   NASA/JHUAPL Copyright:  Copyright Free Date Released:  2009-10-01

• Mercury
• MESSENGER

Date Acquired: September 29, 2009
Image Mission Elapsed Time (MET): 162739761
Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Resolution: 800 meters/pixel (0.50 miles/pixel)
Scale: This image is about 820 kilometers (510 miles) wide
Spacecraft Altitude: 31,500 kilometers (19,600 miles)

Mercury's surface is covered with craters in many sizes and arrangements, the result of impacts that have occurred over billions of years. In the top center of the image, outlined in a white box and shown in the enlargement at upper right, is a cluster of impact craters on Mercury that appears coincidentally to resemble a giant paw print. In the "heel" are overlapping craters, made by a series of impacts occurring on top of each other over time. The four "toes" are single craters arranged in an arc northward of the "heel." The "toes" don't overlap so it isn't possible to tell their ages relative to each other. The newly identified pit-floor crater can be seen in the center of the main image as the crater containing a depression shaped like a backward and upside-down comma.

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