Scarlatti (crater)
Encyclopedia
Scarlatti is a pit-floored crater on Mercury
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...

, which was discovered in 1974 by 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...

 spacecraft. It has a prominent peak ring, which floor is covered by the smooth plain material. The crater displays an arcuate collapse feature (central pit) along the peak ring. The size of the pit, which was first noticed in 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...

 images obtained in January 2008, is . Such a feature may have resulted from collapse of a magma chamber
Magma chamber
A magma chamber is a large underground pool of molten rock found beneath the surface of the Earth. The molten rock in such a chamber is under great pressure, and given enough time, that pressure can gradually fracture the rock around it creating outlets for the magma...

 underlying the central peak ring complex of the crater. The collapse feature is an analog of Earth's volcanic caldera
Caldera
A caldera is a cauldron-like volcanic feature usually formed by the collapse of land following a volcanic eruption, such as the one at Yellowstone National Park in the US. They are sometimes confused with volcanic craters...

s. Scarlatti is thought to have the same age as the 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...

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