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OrbitStudio / Mercury landmarks / Kuiper Crater

Kuiper Crater

A young crater with bright rays, first seen in Mariner 10's pictures of Mercury and named after a Dutch-American astronomer on the team that took them. At 62 kilometers it is right at the size where Mercury's elevation data starts to hold a crater's shape.

Diameter62 km
Coordinates11.34° S, 31.32° W
TypeYoung, bright-rayed impact crater with central peaks
First seenIn Mariner 10's images, 1974
Named afterGerard P. Kuiper, Dutch-American astronomer and member of the original Mariner 10 imaging team (1905–1973)
Elevation sourceThe USGS global elevation model of Mercury, from NASA MESSENGER images

Diameter and name from the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (older Mariner 10 captions give 41 and 60 km); the rest from NASA's MESSENGER and Mariner 10 image releases. Coordinates are the center point OrbitStudio uses for this destination.

Where is Kuiper on Mercury?

Kuiper is centered at 11.34° south, 31.32° west, just south of Mercury's equator. The gazetteer, which counts Mercury's longitudes westward, gives the same 31.32° west. First seen in Mariner 10's images, it is an important marker for dating the surface around it: anything its bright rays lie across is older than the crater.

Why is Kuiper so bright?

Because it is young. An impact digs up relatively unweathered material from below the surface and throws it out in bright rays. Mariner 10's scientists called Kuiper the brightest and perhaps the youngest crater they saw, a conspicuous bright spot visible while Mercury was still more than two million miles away. The Mariner 10 team proposed the name in 1974, for Gerard Kuiper, a member of their imaging team who had died the year before.

What does Kuiper look like as a 3D print?

A clean bowl with a raised rim. Framed as tightly as Mercury allows, with about 102 kilometers of ground across a model 200 millimeters wide, the crater spans about 120 millimeters of it, and the roughly 3.3 kilometers of relief in that view come out at about 6.5 millimeters at 1x. At 2x it reads as a deep crater.

Its bright rays are a matter of color, not height, so a terrain print does not show them. The rim and the bowl come through clearly; the central peaks are low and soft in this elevation model, which is built from stereo images and holds features under about 50 kilometers only roughly.

Print Kuiper 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.

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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.