Hemingway (crater)

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Hemingway
Hemingway crater.png
Hemingway is in the lower right corner of this MESSENGER image, from its second flyby in October 2008
Feature typeImpact crater
Location Kuiper quadrangle, Mercury
Coordinates 17°30′N2°54′W / 17.5°N 2.9°W / 17.5; -2.9
Diameter126 km (78 mi)
Eponym Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is a crater on Mercury. It has a patch of very dark material located near its center. The dark color is likely due to rocks that have a different mineralogical composition from that of the surrounding surface. [1]

The crater's name was adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2009. It is named for the American author Ernest Hemingway. [2] [ why? ]

The small crater Makeba is southeast of Hemingway.

Dark interior crater

The dark depression near the center of Hemingway is truly black, and due to its superposition over the other structures in the crater, it is a young feature. The dark material is probably abundant in the subsurface of the crater and is being exposed by mass wasting processes and the formation of hollows. [3] The irregular depression itself may have formed by explosive volcanism. [4]

References

  1. ↑ A Patch of Black (2009), NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
  2. ↑ "Hemingway". Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. NASA . Retrieved 5 June 2020.
  3. ↑ Xiao, Z., Xu, R., Wang, Y., Chang, Y., Xu, R., & Cui, J. (2021). Recent dark pyroclastic deposits on Mercury. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2021GL092532. doi.org/10.1029/2021GL092532
  4. ↑ David Pegg, David Rothery, M.R. Balme, Susan Conway, 2021. Explosive vent sites on Mercury: Commonplace multiple eruptions and their implications. Icarus 365:114510. doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114510


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