The Caloris Basin is one of the largest basins resulting from collisions in the solar system, this. This happened 4 billion years ago, asteroids left their impact on Mercury with a basin extending a diameter of about 1550 km, it. It was discovered in 1974 from mission Mariner 10 images, Butbut this happened while the spacecraft left the atmosphere of the planet. As a result, only the eastern half of the basin was illuminated. During its first flight on January 14, 2008, Thethe Messenger captured a high-resolution image of the western half of the basin.
When Mariner 10 photographed the Caloris basinBasin, the lighting conditions were very different from those of the Messenger. Regardless of the lighting conditions, the image taken by the Messenger shows us that the basin is bigger than we previously thought.
The collision triggered a violent earthquake that formed the basin and the prominent hills on the planet's surface. Images of mercury's surface clearly show the terrain, basins and mountain ranges scattered on mercury's surface, which helped scientists to develop a detailed map of the planet's surface, showing each region individually, and findfinding the area and geographical location of each crater.