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Discovery Rupes

A cliff hundreds of kilometers long, pushed up where one slab of Mercury's crust was driven over another as the planet shrank. It cuts straight through a crater on its way, and with some exaggeration it prints as a long, unmistakable step across the ground.

LengthAbout 400 km (the gazetteer gives 412 km)
ReliefUp to about 1 km, as measured from Mariner 10's images
Coordinates54.7° S, 37.24° W
TypeLobate scarp, the surface trace of a thrust fault
Named afterDiscovery, James Cook's ship on his last voyage to the Pacific (1776–80)
Elevation sourceThe USGS global elevation model of Mercury, from NASA MESSENGER images

Name and gazetteer length from the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature; the 400 km length and the crossing of Rameau crater from NASA's MESSENGER image release; the relief from NASA's Mariner 10 catalog, which describes the scarp as almost 500 km long. Coordinates are the center point OrbitStudio uses for this destination.

Where is Discovery Rupes on Mercury?

Discovery Rupes is centered at 54.7° south, 37.24° west, in Mercury's southern hemisphere. The gazetteer, which counts Mercury's longitudes westward, gives the same 37.24° west. It was first seen in images from Mariner 10, which flew past Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975, and it carries the name of Captain Cook's ship.

Why does Mercury have cliffs like Discovery Rupes?

Because the whole planet shrank. As Mercury's interior cooled over billions of years it contracted, and the crust, with less room, broke along thrust faults where one side was pushed up and over the other. The scarps are the result, and they run for hundreds of kilometers across the surface. One estimate from MESSENGER's global images has Mercury's radius shrinking by as much as 7 kilometers, well beyond what earlier estimates allowed.

What does Discovery Rupes look like as a 3D print?

A long step that needs exaggeration. Framed so that about 470 kilometers of ground fill a model 200 millimeters across, a cliff up to about a kilometer high is a step of under half a millimeter at true scale. At 3x to 5x it becomes a clear ledge of 1.3 to 2.1 millimeters running across the model, with Rameau crater cut through by it.

The global elevation model suits a feature this long: the scarp runs for hundreds of kilometers, so it comes through even where its height is modest. Its finer detail, the lobes along its front and the small craters on either side, is softened.

Print Discovery Rupes in OrbitStudio Watch how it works · 1:12

What is OrbitStudio?

OrbitStudio turns real elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Mercury on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from the USGS global elevation model of Mercury, made from NASA MESSENGER images at 665 meters per pixel, with sharper polar maps blended in toward the poles.

Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — uses one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon and Mars too.

Other landmarks

Rachmaninoff Prokofiev Kuiper All Mercury landmarks

The night sky, too

OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.