Sentences with phrase «polar craters match»

MESSENGER's maps of polar craters match up nicely with earlier imagery of the poles, taken by Earth - based radars, which showed anomalously bright features — patches that reflected radio waves much better than the surrounding terrain, just as ice does.

Not exact matches

Now Harmon has carried out a new radar survey of Mercury, which shows that the areas which strongly reflect radio waves match closely the positions of polar craters photographed by Mariner 10, the American spacecraft which flew past Mercury in 1974 and 1975.

The researchers discovered that the reflective features on the map match polar craters seen by Mariner 10 if the positions deduced from the spacecraft are about 1.5 degrees in error.