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OrbitStudio / Mercury landmarks / Rachmaninoff Basin

Rachmaninoff Basin

A double-ringed impact basin with the lowest point on Mercury in its floor, and some of the youngest volcanic plains found on the planet inside its inner ring. Framed whole it prints as a wide, shallow bowl with a ring of hills standing in the middle.

Diameter305 km; the inner peak ring about 136 km
Lowest point5,380 m below Mercury's average elevation, the lowest in the global elevation model
Coordinates27.66° N, 57.37° E
TypePeak-ring impact basin
Named afterSergei Rachmaninoff, Russian composer, pianist and conductor (1873–1943)
Elevation sourceThe USGS global elevation model of Mercury, from NASA MESSENGER images

Diameter and name from the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (earlier papers give 290 km); the peak ring and the model ages from Marchi et al. (2011); the volcanic plains from NASA; the lowest point from the USGS global elevation model (Becker et al., 2016). Coordinates are the center point OrbitStudio uses for this destination.

Where is Rachmaninoff on Mercury?

Rachmaninoff is centered at 27.66° north, 57.37° east, in Mercury's northern hemisphere. The gazetteer, which counts Mercury's longitudes westward, puts it at 302.63° west. The International Astronomical Union named it after the Russian composer in 2010.

Why is Rachmaninoff's floor so smooth?

Lava filled it. The smooth plains inside the inner ring are, in NASA's words, products of relatively young volcanism, the youngest documented on Mercury when MESSENGER found them. Crater counts give a model age of about 3.6 billion years for the impact that made the basin and about 0.7 billion years for the plains inside its peak ring, so the lava came long after the basin formed. Those plains are crossed by roughly concentric troughs.

What does Rachmaninoff look like as a 3D print?

A wide, shallow bowl at true scale. Framed so that about 350 kilometers of ground fill a model 200 millimeters across, the roughly 6 kilometers of relief in that view come out at about 3.5 millimeters. At 2x to 3x the rim and the deep floor read clearly. At that framing the peak ring, about 136 kilometers across, is a circle of hills nearly 80 millimeters wide in the middle of the model.

The elevation data shows a feature this size well: the rim, the ring of hills and the low floor inside it all come through. The troughs on the floor and the small craters around it do not. In our tests, craters under about 50 kilometers across come out soft and blocky in this elevation model, which is built from stereo images rather than measured point by point.

Print Rachmaninoff 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.