Liguria quadrangle
Encyclopedia
Mercury (planet)
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the Solar System, orbiting the Sun once every 87.969 Earth days. The orbit of Mercury has the highest eccentricity of all the Solar System planets, and it has the smallest axial tilt. It completes three rotations about its axis for every two orbits...
. Only a thin strip of its territory along the eastern border with Shakespeare quadrangle
Shakespeare quadrangle
The Shakespeare quadrangle is a region of Mercury running from 90 to 180° longitude and 20 to 70° latitude. It is also called Caduceata.-Mariner 10 imaging:...
was illuminated when Mariner 10
Mariner 10
Mariner 10 was an American robotic space probe launched by NASA on November 3, 1973, to fly by the planets Mercury and Venus. It was launched approximately two years after Mariner 9 and was the last spacecraft in the Mariner program...
made its three flybys of the planet and so it was not mapped in detail until it was visited by MESSENGER
MESSENGER
The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging space probe is a robotic NASA spacecraft in orbit around the planet Mercury. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Delta II rocket in August 2004 to study the chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field of Mercury...
decades later. It is named after the Liguria albedo feature.
Caloris Basin
Caloris Basin
The Caloris Basin, also called Caloris Planitia, is a large impact crater on Mercury about in diameter, one of the largest impact basins in the solar system. Caloris is Latin for heat and the basin is so-named because the Sun is almost directly overhead every second time Mercury passes perihelion...
is centered in Liguria, though it overlaps significantly with the Tolstoj
Tolstoj quadrangle
The Tolstoj quadrangle in the equatorial region of Mercury runs from 144 to 216° longitude and -25 to 25° latitude. It was provisionally called "Tir", but renamed after Leo Tolstoy by the International Astronomical Union in 1976. Also called Phaethontias....
and Shakespeare quadrangle
Shakespeare quadrangle
The Shakespeare quadrangle is a region of Mercury running from 90 to 180° longitude and 20 to 70° latitude. It is also called Caduceata.-Mariner 10 imaging:...
s.