Berkel is a crater on the planet

Mercury Mercury commonly refers to: * Mercury (planet), the nearest planet to the Sun * Mercury (element), a metallic chemical element with the symbol Hg * Mercury (mythology), a Roman god Mercury or The Mercury may also refer to: Companies * Merc ...

. Its name was approved by the

IAU The International Astronomical Union (IAU; french: link=yes, Union astronomique internationale, UAI) is a nongovernmental organisation with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreach ...

on July 9, 2009. It was named after the modernist painter

Sabri Berkel Sabri Fetah Berkel (1907–1993) was a Turkish-Albanian modernist painter; he was one of the most important painters and academic personalities of the last century in Turkey. Berkel was born in Skopje, where, in 1927, he completed high school at a ...

. The crater contains dark material in its center and in a ring immediately surrounding it. Moreover, Berkel is surrounded by a blanket of bright

ejecta Ejecta (from the Latin: "things thrown out", singular ejectum) are particles ejected from an area. In volcanology, in particular, the term refers to particles including pyroclastic materials (tephra) that came out of a volcanic explosion and magma ...

and a system of bright rays. Other craters on Mercury's surface, such as Bashō, also exhibit both bright rays and dark halos. In contrast, two neighboring craters have bright rays but lack dark halos. The floor of Berkel is a ''dark spot'' of low reflectance material (LRM), closely associated with hollows. Berkel lies within the much larger and older crater Ellington, which is to the southeast of Derain. Both Derain and Ellington lie within a much older, 730-km-diameter, unnamed crater (referred to as b36).Chapman, C. R., ''et al.'', 2018. Impact Cratering on Mercury. In ''Mercury: The View After

MESSENGER ''MESSENGER'' was a NASA robotic space probe that orbited the planet Mercury between 2011 and 2015, studying Mercury's chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field. The name is a backronym for "Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geoche ...

'' edited by Sean C. Solomon, Larry R. Nittler, and Brian J. Anderson. Cambridge Planetary Science. Chapter 9, Figure 9.2 (a). Berkel crater EN1004159492M.map.jpg, Map-projected image Berkel crater EN1034838972M.jpg, Oblique close-up

References

Impact craters on Mercury {{Mercury-planet-stub