Vonnegut is a crater on Mercury, near the north pole. It was named by the IAU in 2017 after the American author Kurt Vonnegut.[1] Part of Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan takes place on Mercury. The crater was referred to as e5 in scientific literature prior to naming.[2]
S band radar data from the Arecibo Observatory collected between 1999 and 2005 indicates a radar-bright area along the southern interior of Vonnegut, which is probably indicative of a water ice deposit, and lies within the permanently shadowed part of the crater.[3][4][5]MESSENGER's Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) was used to measure surface reflectance of the surface of the planet, and the radar-bright material is covered by low-reflectance material.[2]
Radar-bright deposits near the north pole. Vonnegut is above center.
Vonnegut is north of the slightly larger Yoshikawa crater.
References
^"Vonnegut (crater)". Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. USGS Astrogeology Research Program.
^Chabot, N. L., D. J. Lawrence, G. A. Neumann, W. C. Feldman, and D. A. Paige, 2018. Mercury's Polar Deposits. In Mercury: The View After MESSENGER edited by Sean C. Solomon, Larry R. Nittler, and Brian J. Anderson. Cambridge Planetary Science. Chapter 13, Figure 13.2.
^PIA19411: Water Ice on Mercury, NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
^John K. Harmon, Martin A. Slade, Melissa S. Rice, 2011. Radar imagery of Mercury’s putative polar ice: 1999–2005 Arecibo results. Icarus, 211, p37-50. doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2010.08.007
