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PIA13472: Mercury's Firdousi Honors the Persian Poet
Mercury's Firdousi Honors the Persian Poet
 Target Name:  Mercury
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  MESSENGER 
 Spacecraft:  MESSENGER
 Instrument:  MDIS - Narrow Angle 
 Product Size:  1144 x 1071 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Johns Hopkins University/APL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA13472.tif (1.227 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA13472.jpg (181.6 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:

The crater in the center of the image was named Firdousi in March 2010 in honor of Hakīm Abu'l-Qāsim Firdawsī Tūsī (940-1020), a revered Persian poet and author of the Shāhnāmeh, 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.

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.

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/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Image Addition Date:
2010-07-20