Goethe's percussion pool on Mercury (1 photo)

This image shows a fragment of the 383-kilometer-wide Goethe impact basin, located in Mercury's northern plains.



This image was acquired by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft on March 29, 2012, as part of the High-Resolution, Three-Color Imaging (HRI) program during its extended mission.

The basin displays some of Mercury's most impressive deformations: numerous folded ridges, ridges, and lobate structures. The latter are likely tectonic in origin, but they resemble solidified lava flows—a mystery that scientists will have to solve.

The image was taken when the Sun was very low above the horizon, lengthening the shadows and highlighting the region's topographic features. This allows even the tiny craters that pockmark the relatively smooth plains of the basin to be seen in the image.

The large crater at the top of the image is in a zone of permanent shadow and contains radar-bright material, likely water ice.

Messenger orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, during which time it transmitted more than 270,000 images and terabytes of data, forever changing our understanding of this fascinating world.