Beckett (crater)
crater on Mercury
Beckett is a pit-floored crater on Mercury, which was discovered in January 2008 during the first flyby of the planet by the MESSENGER spacecraft. The crater was named in November 2008 by the IAU, after Australian artist Clarice Beckett.
Its floor is not smooth and displays a telephone or arc-shaped collapse feature, which is also called a central pit. The size of the pit is 35 × 7.5 km. Such a feature may have resulted from the collapse of a magma chamber underlying the central part of the crater (see also Gibran, Glinka, and Picasso). The collapse feature is an analog of Earth's volcanic calderas. Beckett may be a site of explosive volcanism. The crater Grainger to the southwest of Beckett also shows signs of explosive volcanism.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beckett (crater)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.