PIA12048: Comparing the Size of Mercury's Rembrandt Basin with the East Coast of the USA
To put the size of Mercury's Rembrandt basin into a familiar context, a NAC mosaic of the basin is overlaid on an AVHRR image of the east coast of the United States
 Target Name:  Mercury
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  MESSENGER 
 Spacecraft:  MESSENGER
 Instrument:  MDIS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  860 x 1227 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Johns Hopkins University/APL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA12048.tif (3.169 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA12048.jpg (266.3 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

To put the size of Mercury's Rembrandt basin into a familiar context, a NAC mosaic of the basin is overlaid on an AVHRR image of the east coast of the United States (see PIA12049). With a diameter of 715 kilometers (444 miles), such a feature if formed at this location on Earth would encompass the cities of Washington, D.C., and Boston, Massachusetts, and everything in between. This graphic was presented last week during a NASA media teleconference Click here to see other items shown during that event.

Date Acquired: October 6, 2008
Instrument: Mercury's Rembrandt basin mosaic: Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS). Image of the Earth: Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR).
Scale: Rembrandt basin is 715 kilometers (444 miles) in diameter

These images are from MESSENGER, a NASA Discovery mission to conduct the first orbital study of the innermost planet, Mercury. For information regarding the use of images, see the MESSENGER image use policy.

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

Image Addition Date:
2009-05-05