In July 2009 the International Astronomical Union approved names for sixteen impact craters on Mercury, each honouring a deceased artist, musician or writer. One of them is Gibran — a crater roughly a hundred kilometres across, sitting east of Degas in Mercury's northern hemisphere, with a great volcanic pit sunk into its floor.
Kahlil Gibran Collective
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KAHLIL GIBRAN COLLECTIVE
By the Kahlil Gibran Collective · Kahlil Gibran Collective · 2014 · kahlilgibran.com
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In July 2009 the International Astronomical Union named sixteen impact craters on Mercury. The craters had been imaged during the MESSENGER spacecraft's first two flybys of the planet, in January and October 2008, and the names were proposed by the MESSENGER science team.1
"Naming the craters helps to identify and improve communication among those studying the planet's geology," said MESSENGER participating scientist Dave Blewett, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The IAU has been the arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since its founding in 1919. In keeping with the established theme for Mercury, every crater on the planet is named after a famous deceased artist, musician or author. The sixteen approved that July were:
· Abedin, after Zainul Abedin, a Bangladeshi painter and printmaker who first attracted attention with his sketches of the Bengal famine of 1943.
· Benoit, after Rigaud Benoit, an early member of the Haïtian art movement known as Naive Art, so called because of its members' limited formal training.
· Berkel, after Sabri Berkel, a Turkish painter and printmaker.
· Calvino, after Italo Calvino, an Italian writer of short stories and novels.
· de Graft, after Joe Coleman de Graft, a prominent Ghanaian writer, playwright and dramatist, appointed the first director of the Ghana Drama Studio in 1962.
· Derain, after André Derain, a French painter and co-founder, with Henri Matisse, of the Fauvism movement.
· Eastman, after Charles A. Eastman, a Native American (Sioux) author, physician and reformer who helped found the Boy Scouts of America.
· Gibran, after Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer, best known for his 1923 book The Prophet, a series of philosophical essays written in English prose.
· Hemingway, after Ernest Hemingway, an American writer and journalist who had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction.
· Hodgkins, after Frances Hodgkins, a New Zealand painter.
· Izquierdo, after María Izquierdo, a Mexican painter who drew on the landscape and traditions of Mexico for her work.
· Kunisada, after Utagawa Kunisada, a Japanese designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
· Lange, after Dorothea Lange, an American documentary photographer of the Depression era.
· Matabei, after Iwasa Matabei, a Japanese painter of the early Edo period.
· Munkácsy, after Mihály Munkácsy, a Hungarian painter.
· To Ngoc Van, after Tô Ngọc Vân, a Vietnamese painter.
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Gibran lies in Mercury's Shakespeare quadrangle, centred near 35.7° north, 111.4° west, a little to the east of the bright rayed crater Degas. Its rim measures a little over a hundred kilometres across — the MESSENGER team gave 102 kilometres from their flyby imagery, and the IAU gazetteer lists it at 106.2 The crater was first seen by Mariner 10 in 1974, but went unnamed for thirty-five years.
What makes it interesting to planetary geologists is not the impact but what came afterwards. Sunk into the crater's floor is a nearly circular pit, roughly twenty-nine kilometres wide — rimless, steep-sided, with none of the ejecta or lava flows that an impact would leave behind. Pit-floor craters of this kind are thought to form when magma withdraws from a shallow chamber and the unsupported ground above it collapses, much as a caldera does on Earth.
MESSENGER's Mercury Dual Imaging System acquired the images that revealed the pit on 14 January 2008, during the spacecraft's first flyby, at a resolution of about 510 metres per pixel.3 Together with the other pit-floor craters found on those early passes, Gibran became part of the evidence that volcanism, not impact alone, shaped the surface of the innermost planet.
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Gibran is in good company. Mercury's map reads like an anthology of world culture — Beethoven and Bach, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Rūmī and Nizāmī, Hokusai and Rodin. That the author of The Prophet should be set among them, on a planet named for the messenger of the gods, is a quiet and rather fitting piece of symmetry.
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1 International Astronomical Union, Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature; announcement reported July 2009 following MESSENGER's first two Mercury flybys of January and October 2008. ↩
2 The MESSENGER mission's own image release gives the crater's diameter as 102 km (63 miles); the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature records 106 km. The difference reflects different measurement bases rather than a disagreement about the feature. ↩
3 MESSENGER, Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), Narrow Angle Camera; image acquired 14 January 2008, resolution approximately 510 m/pixel. NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Carnegie Institution of Washington. ↩
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