Mercury’s South Polar Region04:33

This animation shows 89 wide-angle camera (WAC) images of Mercury’s south polar region acquired by the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) over one complete Mercury solar day (176 Earth days). This dataset enabled the illumination conditions at Mercury’s south polar region to be quantified, producing the map seen at the end of the movie and provided as a separate image. The map is colored on the basis of the percentage of time that a given area is sunlit; areas appearing black in the map are regions of permanent shadow. The movie and illumination map are shown in polar stereographic projection, extending northward to 73° S, and 0° longitude is at the top. The large crater near Mercury’s south pole, Chao Meng-Fu, has a diameter of 180 km.