NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Heart of Darkness

"Low Reflectance Material" (LRM) is one of the major color-compositional units that has been identified on Mercury in MESSENGER multispectral images. The impact crater in the lower left of the image above has excavated LRM from the subsurface. This color presentation was made from images in the 830-, 560- and 430-nm filters as red-green-blue.

Date acquired: April 10, 2011

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington