Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 21 Sep
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
On 4th of September 2024, Bepicolombo skimmed past Mercury at an altitude of just 165 km above the surface.
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This was the fourth time it undertook one of these flybys, each getting it closer than before.
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You can see some of the discoveries from the first view in my last Baby Colomba video here.
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As Beppi Colombo pulled away, its monitoring cameras captured something that immediately caught scientists' attention.
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A massive, perfectly round crater called a peak ring basin.
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Peak ring basins are some of the strangest landforms in the solar system.
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They're enormous.
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The ones on Mercury measure between 130 and 330 km across and are created by powerful asteroid or comet impacts.
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They strike the planet with such force that the ground itself rebounds, creating a ring of mountain peaks on the crater floor.
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You can think of it like
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like a geological shockwave frozen in stone.
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Now the existence of these peakering basins wasn't new information, but these images were the first to showcase them in such high resolution and from so close up.
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Take a look at this.
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This is the Vivaldi crater, measuring 213 km across.
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Because Beppe Colombo approached from the night side, it managed to capture this dramatic photo emphasizing its terrain thanks to the shadows of the sunrise below.
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And for the first time, scientists got a glimpse at the visible gap in the ring of the peaks, where ancient lava flows would have entered and flooded the crater.
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Just a few minutes later, Beppy Colombo snapped a photo of another Pekering basin which had not yet been named.
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Since it came into such clear view, David Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the UK's Open University and part of the Be Colombo imaging team, decided to name it, in case it would be of interest to Mercury scientists in the future.
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And so, the 155km wide crater was dubbed Stoddard, after the New Zealand painter Margaret Stoddard.
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Mercury's surface was littered with these formations, making them one of the highest priority targets for Bepi Colombo to investigate once it slots into orbit around the planet.
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Showing 2361–2380 of 29,301 · page 119 of 1466
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