What are those unusual features on planet Mercury?

Image Credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW

The slightly bluish tinge of features dubbed hollows has been exaggerated on the above image by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft currently orbiting Mercury.
The rounded depressions appear different than impact craters and nothing like them has been noted on Earth's Moon or anywhere else in the Solar System. The above image is a section of the floor of Raditladi impact basin about 40 kilometers wide that includes the mountains of the central peak.
One progenitor hypothesis is that the hollows formed from the sublimation of material exposed and heated during the violent impact that created the Raditladi basin. NASA's MESSENEGER is the first space spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, and is currently scheduled to explore the Solar System's innermost planet into 2013.

This bluish color makes me think of iced water; very unlikely on Mercury though!...

Source: APOD

Originally posted by elevenaugust

Image Credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW

The slightly bluish tinge of features dubbed hollows has been exaggerated on the above image by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft currently orbiting Mercury.
The rounded depressions appear different than impact craters and nothing like them has been noted on Earth's Moon or anywhere else in the Solar System. The above image is a section of the floor of Raditladi impact basin about 40 kilometers wide that includes the mountains of the central peak.
One progenitor hypothesis is that the hollows formed from the sublimation of material exposed and heated during the violent impact that created the Raditladi basin. NASA's MESSENEGER is the first space spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, and is currently scheduled to explore the Solar System's innermost planet into 2013.

This bluish color makes me think of iced water; very unlikely on Mercury though!...

Source: APOD

edit on 27-3-2012 by elevenaugust because: (no reason given)

what ever it i looks like mineral deposits and may be worth alot lithium comes in blue

I'd found this out of curiosity to see just how hot it really does get there...

It is understood that the sunny side may reach temperatures of 750 to 800 degrees F., while the nighttime temperature plummets to nearly -330 degrees F. The average temperature on Mercury is a balmy 354 degrees F. In addition, since Mercury has virtually no atmosphere to scatter light, the sky would be black, even though the Sun's disk itself would be over twice as large as what we observe from the Earth.

Source

Do we have anything that can even be used to make a rover or probe to sample the surface there? 800 Degrees sounds downright toasty....

Originally posted by elevenaugust

Image Credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW

The slightly bluish tinge of features dubbed hollows has been exaggerated on the above image by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft currently orbiting Mercury.
The rounded depressions appear different than impact craters and nothing like them has been noted on Earth's Moon or anywhere else in the Solar System. The above image is a section of the floor of Raditladi impact basin about 40 kilometers wide that includes the mountains of the central peak.
One progenitor hypothesis is that the hollows formed from the sublimation of material exposed and heated during the violent impact that created the Raditladi basin. NASA's MESSENEGER is the first space spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, and is currently scheduled to explore the Solar System's innermost planet into 2013.

This bluish color makes me think of iced water; very unlikely on Mercury though!... get some chem lessons please

Source: APOD

edit on 27-3-2012 by elevenaugust because: (no reason given)

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
I'd found this out of curiosity to see just how hot it really does get there...

It is understood that the sunny side may reach temperatures of 750 to 800 degrees F., while the nighttime temperature plummets to nearly -330 degrees F. The average temperature on Mercury is a balmy 354 degrees F. In addition, since Mercury has virtually no atmosphere to scatter light, the sky would be black, even though the Sun's disk itself would be over twice as large as what we observe from the Earth.

Source

Do we have anything that can even be used to make a rover or probe to sample the surface there? 800 Degrees sounds downright toasty....

no way merc get to -330 what ever ITS NEXT TO THE DAANM SUN!! are your nights that cold?

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


btw the russckies did it long time ago, from what i here from navy sci brats was about 17 mins of gathering.

reply to post by chapterhouse


The lack of atmosphere is what causes the temp to drop so low at night. As well as rise so high during the daytime. Yes...it's a lot closer to the sun, but with no atmosphere to hold the heat in when it's not in direct sunlight it will drop no matter where you are.

reply to post by elevenaugust


Mercury gets little respect. It's there, it's got an orbiter, but you never hear a group of people say "We have to send a rover to Mercury". Mars, that's where the action is, and Europa. Mercury just keeps going round and round...

Maybe if earth had a real space program with hundreds of billions of dollars spent yearly to explore the solar system, we'd get around to developing a rover capable of withstanding the heat of Mercury. Venus? We hardly knew ye.

Originally posted by elevenaugust
This bluish color makes me think of iced water; very unlikely on Mercury though!...

The image would quite likely be a false colour image, so it wouldn't actually look that blue (if at all), to the naked eye. But who knows, there could be water ice trapped deep beneath the surface somewhere on Mercury.

reply to post by chapterhouse


Well Mercury has a side that faces away from the sun for nearly 30 earth days, and with no atmosphere it gets pretty damn cold without sun rays. Atmosphere is how Venus is hotter than Mercury and it matters little if it is day or night on Venus, it has runaway global warming.

reply to post by jra

The image would quite likely be a false colour image, so it wouldn't actually look that blue (if at all), to the naked eye. But who knows, there could be water ice trapped deep beneath the surface somewhere on Mercury.

Correct, it is a false color image. Mercury has turned out to be a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. It is extremely dense, suggesting it has a much larger iron core than originally thought, but it also has much, much larger deposits of volatiles like sulfur, which should have boiled off eons ago. There is also evidence of rudimentary tectonics, not unlike Venus. Fascinating place.

Cool pic!

Is that a false color image? They say they tweeked it, but I'm pretty used to pictures being shown to us being false color images.

That doesn't change the fact those features are there however, and they almost look like something that was there, but has long since eroded away? No idea what would have done that, since the temps there would have been much hotter when the impact basin formed than what the sun does to the surface! heh.

Slightly more information and pictures here
Messenger Multimedia Page

“To the surprise of the science team, it turns out that the bright areas are composed of small, shallow, irregularly shaped depressions that are often found in clusters,” says David Blewett, a staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and lead author of one of the Science reports. “The science team adopted the term ‘hollows’ for these features to distinguish them from other types of pits seen on Mercury.” Hollows have been found over a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, suggesting that they are fairly common across Mercury. Many of the depressions have bright interiors and halos, and Blewett says the ones detected so far have a fresh appearance and have not accumulated small impact craters, indicating that they are relatively young. “Analysis of the images and estimates of the rate at which the hollows may be growing led to the conclusion that they could be actively forming today,” Blewett says.

9/29/2011 Press Release

Originally posted by eriktheawful
Is that a false color image?

The image was created by merging high-resolution monochrome images from MESSENGER's Narrow Angle Camera with a lower-resolution enhanced-color image obtained by the Wide Angle Camera.

source

Originally posted by chapterhouse

Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
I'd found this out of curiosity to see just how hot it really does get there...

It is understood that the sunny side may reach temperatures of 750 to 800 degrees F., while the nighttime temperature plummets to nearly -330 degrees F. The average temperature on Mercury is a balmy 354 degrees F. In addition, since Mercury has virtually no atmosphere to scatter light, the sky would be black, even though the Sun's disk itself would be over twice as large as what we observe from the Earth.

Source

Do we have anything that can even be used to make a rover or probe to sample the surface there? 800 Degrees sounds downright toasty....

no way merc get to -330 what ever ITS NEXT TO THE DAANM SUN!! are your nights that cold?

No idea if it would be THAT cold, but there are certainly craters on Mercury that NEVER receive any sunlight, even when their side of the planet is facing the sun. Most happen to be near the poles however, fyi.

reply to post by iforget


So it actually looks very close to that! Wow.....to quote my youngest son: "Way too cool!"

hehehehe

Originally posted by iforget

Originally posted by eriktheawful
Is that a false color image?

The image was created by merging high-resolution monochrome images from MESSENGER's Narrow Angle Camera with a lower-resolution enhanced-color image obtained by the Wide Angle Camera.

source

Blue is often used as a false color for some features the scientists want to see "stand out" because the color used for the majority of the surface is usually brownish/yellowish, and blue contrasts very well with those browns and yellows.

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Here's a fact about digital pictures some people may not realize (although other may already know): All digital cameras are basically "color blind", and use computer algorithms to assign colors to grayscale information based on the intensities of those grayscales when a the subject of an image is viewed though multiple filters.

Every digital camera (Both the one you own and NASA's) has a light sensor that can only "see" in grayscale. All digital photos (the ones you take with your home camera and NASA's) are actually compose of grayscale images seen through multiple filters of various wavelengths that provide different intensities of grayscale for different colors. A computer (either in your camera or at NASA) then analyzes the different grayscale intensities and assigns different colors to each grayscale pixel, based on what that computer knows about the relationship between gray-scales and the "true" color. This will return a "true" color image -- even though the light sensor only sees in gray-scale.

The method for how both your consumer camera and how NASA's cameras achieve getting an image to go through the multiple filters of various wavelengths for a single image may be differ from each other, but the basic concept of determining color from grayscale information is still the same.

NASA imaging scientists can take that one step further. They can take the different grayscale parts of an image and assign whatever "False Color" they want top the different intensities to make certain things stand out more from others. Therefore, they may often assign a blue color to a certain gray-scale intensity seen through a filter of a certain wavelength (often isolating a specific material that is more pronounced under specific wavelength filters), and in that way they can make that isolated material "pop out" of the image with a contrasting blue color against a yellowish-brown background.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Thank you for that It is mentioned in the sources I posted that the blue areas are "relatively more blue than typical mercury surface" and "highly reflective"

so I would say that the blue color in not intended to be entirely false for highlighting in this case