The Unseen Side of Mercury Revealed

(Above) This image shows the first historic look at the previously unseen side of Mercury.

Just above and to the left of center of this image is a small crater with a pronounced set of bright rays extending across Mercury’s surface away from the crater. Bright rays are commonly made in a crater-forming explosion when an asteroid strikes the surface of an airless body like the Moon or Mercury. But rays fade with time as tiny meteoroids and particles from the solar wind strike the surface and darken the rays. The prominence of these rays implies that the small crater at the center of the ray pattern formed comparatively recently.