Mercury Takes Quite a Beating

Mercury

In an effort to compare the relative rates of landform evolution on the Moon and Mercury, Caleb Fassett of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and his team measured the depth-to-diameter ratios of simple craters on the two objects. They focused on craters between 2.5 and 5 km in diameter that impacted into two comparable geological units of similar ages: the smooth plains of Mercury and the maria of the Moon. Results indicate that Mercury’s topography erodes at a rate at least twice that of the Moon. READ MORE »