 Click on image to enlarge. | Mercury's Firdousi Honors the Persian PoetRelease Date: July 20, 2010 Topics: Firdousi, Mercury Flyby 3, Mosaics, |
Date: September 29, 2009.
Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Resolution: 500 meters/pixel (0.31 miles/pixel)
Scale: The diameter of Firdousi is 96 kilometers (60 miles)
Projection: This image is a portion of the global Mercury mosaic.
Of Interest: The crater in the center of the image was named Firdousi in March 2010 in honor of HakÄ«m Abu'l-QÄsim FirdawsÄ« TÅ«sÄ« (940-1020), a revered Persian poet and author of the ShÄhnÄmeh, the national epic of the Persian people. MESSENGER imaged this crater at an oblique angle as the spacecraft approached Mercury for its third flyby. The view shown here is a cylindrical reprojection. Firdousi is notable for the distinctive chains of small secondary craters that radiate outward from the main impact site. That these chains of secondary craters can still be seen and have not been obliterated by subsequent impact events indicates that Firdousi is a relatively young crater on Mercury's surface.
Instrument: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS)
Resolution: 500 meters/pixel (0.31 miles/pixel)
Scale: The diameter of Firdousi is 96 kilometers (60 miles)
Projection: This image is a portion of the global Mercury mosaic.
Of Interest: The crater in the center of the image was named Firdousi in March 2010 in honor of HakÄ«m Abu'l-QÄsim FirdawsÄ« TÅ«sÄ« (940-1020), a revered Persian poet and author of the ShÄhnÄmeh, the national epic of the Persian people. MESSENGER imaged this crater at an oblique angle as the spacecraft approached Mercury for its third flyby. The view shown here is a cylindrical reprojection. Firdousi is notable for the distinctive chains of small secondary craters that radiate outward from the main impact site. That these chains of secondary craters can still be seen and have not been obliterated by subsequent impact events indicates that Firdousi is a relatively young crater on Mercury's surface.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
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