Mercury's Caloris Basin Rim

Project highlights: Is the rim of Mercury's largest impact basin as unusual as it seems? What controls its form? Most suitable for a geoscience graduate with GIS skills Working with science team members of an active planetary orbital mission Project description: The 1550 km diameter Caloris basin is Mercury's largest well-preserved impact basin and is

an exemplar for the study of basin formation. The Caloris floor is hidden, having been completely flooded by plains lavas soon after formation, but the basin rim is well seen around most of the circumference. This rim is remarkable for its locally stepwise form including re-entrants on a scale of about 20 km to 200 km. We want to establish how much

of this has been inherited from the excavation stage of basin formation versus how much of it results from collapse of portions of the original rim (the modification stage of crater formation) or from even later volcano-tectonic events. Stepwise forms are lacking in the rims of smaller basins on Mercury. The Moon's

multiringed Orientale basin has been suggested as a possible analogue, but the comparison does not bear close scrutiny. A student with modelling skills could make much if this, but the project does not have to go in that direction