The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recently approved new names for
features on Mercury that were all seen for the first time in images taken
by MESSENGER during the spacecraft's first flyby of the planet. Read the
full press release for additional details about the naming process and the
origin of the names, and visit the U.S. Geological Survey website, the
Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, to learn about all of the named
planetary features in the Solar System.
This image, produced by mosaicking many Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) images
together, shows the locations of the newly named features, along with the
craters Basho, Mozart, and Tolstoj, first seen by the Mariner 10 mission.
Close-up views of many of these features are available in the MESSENGER
website image gallery. In particular, look at these previous releases for
NAC high-resolution images of Apollodorus, Beagle Rupes, Eminescu, Mozart,
Neruda, Pantheon Fossae, Raditladi, and Sander.
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.