Tir Planitia

Planitia on Mercury

Crater on Mercury

0°48′N 176°06′W / 0.8°N 176.1°W / 0.8; -176.1QuadrangleTolstojEponymPersian word for Mercury

Tir Planitia is a large plain on the planet Mercury. The name Tir (تیر) is the Persian word for "Mercury",^[1], and the name was approved in 1976.^[2] It was first observed in detail by Mariner 10.^[3] It lies between the large crater Mozart and the ancient Tolstoj basin.

Tir Planitia is one of four named plains that surround the Caloris basin (with Mearcair Planitia, Stilbon Planitia, and Odin Planitia). All of these plains are classified as smooth, as opposed to intracrater plains which have rougher topography. They also contain areas where kilometer-scale knobs protrude above the plains, and these areas are called the Odin Formation. The Odin Formation is interpreted as a mixture of impact melt and blocky basin ejecta, formed by the Caloris impact event.^[4]

The crater Fet is near the center of Tir Planitia. Hovnatanian crater is southwest of Fet. The craters Amru Al-Qays and Nureyev are in northern Tir Planitia.

Exaggerated color image of part of Tir Planitia by MESSENGER. Hovnatanian crater is in lower left.
Oblique view of Fet crater (upper left) in Tir Planitia, showing the nature of the smooth plain

References

^ Grego, Peter (2008). Venus and Mercury, and how to Observe Them. Springer. p. 48. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
^ "Tir Planitia". Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. IAU/NASA/USGS. Retrieved 20 August 2023.
^ SHADED RELIEF MAP OF THE TOLSTOJ QUADRANGLE OF MERCURY, Atlas of Mercury, NASA Special Publication 432, 1978.
^ Denevi, B. W., Earnst, C. M., Prockter, L. M., and Robinson, M. S., 2018. The Geologic History of Mercury. In Mercury: The View After MESSENGER edited by Sean C. Solomon, Larry R. Nittler, and Brian J. Anderson. Cambridge Planetary Science. Section 6.3.3.

Mercury

Outline

Geography

General	Albedo features Atmosphere Features Magnetic field
Regions	Quadrangles
Quadrangles	Bach Beethoven Borealis Debussy Derain Discovery Eminescu Hokusai Kuiper Michelangelo Neruda Shakespeare Raditladi Tolstoj Victoria
Mountains and volcanoes	Caloris Montes
Plains and plateaus	Borealis Planitia Budh Planitia Caloris Planitia Odin Planitia Sobkou Planitia Suisei Planitia Tir Planitia
Canyons and valleys	Arecibo Catena Arecibo Vallis Goldstone Catena Goldstone Vallis Haystack Catena Haystack Vallis Simeiz Vallis
Ridges and rupes	Antoniadi Dorsum Adventure Rupes Beagle Rupes Discovery Rupes Enterprise Rupes Hero Rupes Resolution Rupes Santa María Rupes Victoria Rupes
Basins and fossae	Caloris Basin Pantheon Fossae Raditladi Basin Rembrandt Basin Skinakas (hypothetical basin)
Craters	Abedin Abu Nuwas Africanus Horton Ahmad Baba Ailey Aksakov Akutagawa Al-Akhtal Alencar Al-Hamadhani Al-Jāhiz Alver Amaral Amru Al-Qays Andal Aneirin Angelou Anguissola Anyte Apollodorus Aristoxenes Aśvaghoṣa Atget Bach Balagtas Balanchine Baranauskas Balzac Bartók Barma Bashō Beckett Beethoven Bek Belinskij Bello Benoit Berkel Bernini Bjornson Boccaccio Boethius Botticelli Brahms Bramante Brontë Bruegel Brunelleschi Burns Byron Callicrates Camoes Carducci Carolan Calvino Cervantes Cézanne Chaikovskij Chao Meng-Fu Chekov Chiang Kʻui Chŏng Chʼŏl Chopin Chu Ta Coleridge Copland Copley Couperin Cunningham Dali Dario De Graft Debussy Degas Delacroix Derain Derzhavin Desprez Dickens Dominici Donne Dostoevskij Dowland Durer Dvorak Eastman Eitoku Eminescu Enheduanna Enwonwu Equiano Faulkner Fet Firdousi Flaubert Flaiano Futabatei Gainsborough Gauguin Geddes Ghiberti Gibran Giotto Glinka Gluck Goethe Gogol Goya Grieg Guido d'Arezzo Hals Han Kan Handel Harunobu Hauptmann Hawthorne Haydn Heine Hemingway Hesiod Hiroshige Hitomaro Hodgkins Hokusai Holbein Holberg Holst Homer Horace Hovnatanian Hugo Hun Kal Hurley Ibsen Ictinus Imhotep Ives Izquierdo Janáček Jokai Judah Ha-Levi Kalidasa Karsh Keats Kenko Kertész Khansa Kipling Kōshō Kuan Han-Chʻing Kuiper Kulthum Kunisada Kurosawa Lange Larrocha Leopardi Lermontov Lessing Li Chʻing-Chao Li Po Liang Kʻai Liszt Lovecraft Lu Hsun Lysippus Ma Chih-Yuan Machaut Mahler Mansart Mansur March Mark Twain Martí Martial Matabei Matisse Melville Mena Mendes Pinto Michelangelo Mickiewicz Milton Mistral Mofolo Molière Monet Monteverdi Moody Mozart Munch Munkácsy Murasaki Mussorgskij Myron Nabokov Nampeyo Navoi Nawahi Neruda Nureyev Nervo Neumann Nizami Okyo Oskison Ovid Petrarch Phidias Picasso Poe Polygnotus Praxiteles Prokofiev Qi Baishi Rachmaninoff Raden Saleh Raditladi Rameau Raphael Rembrandt Renoir Rivera Rizal Rodin Rudaki Sander Scarlatti Schubert Shakespeare Sholem Aleichem Sinan Stravinsky Sullivan Sveinsdóttir Titian To Ngoc Van Tolstoj Velázquez Verdi Villa-Lobos Vivaldi Vyasa Xiao Zhao Yeats Zola
Other	Geology Ghost craters Inter-crater plains

Moons

Hypothetical moon of Mercury

Astronomy

Transits	Earth Mars
Asteroids	Mercury-crossing asteroids

Exploration

Current and past	Mariner 10 (1973–1975) MESSENGER (2004–2015) BepiColombo (2018–present)
Proposed	Mercury-P (~2031)
See also	Colonization of Mercury