To Ngoc Van (crater)

To Ngoc Van is a pit-floored crater on Mercury, named after the Vietnamese artist Tô Ngọc Vân. It was discovered in January 2008 during the first flyby of the planet by MESSENGER spacecraft. Its floor displays an irregularly shaped collapse feature, which is called a central pit. The size of the pit is . Such a feature may have resulted from collapse of a magma chamber underlying the central part of the crater. The collapse feature is an analog of Earth's volcanic calderas. See unnamed crater 1. The pit may be evidence of explosive volcanism on the floor of the crater.David Pegg, David Rothery, M.R. Balme, Susan Conway, 2021. Explosive vent sites on Mercury: Commonplace multiple eruptions and their implications. Icarus 365:114510. doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114510

To the southeast of To Ngoc Van is Bruegel crater, and to the northwest is Burns. To the northeast is a large (329 km diameter), unnamed crater of Tolstojan in age.Denevi, B. W., Ernst, C. M., Prockter, L. M., and Robinson, M. S., 2018. The Geologic History of Mercury. In Mercury: The View After MESSENGER edited by Sean C. Solomon, Larry R. Nittler, and Brian J. Anderson. Cambridge Planetary Science. Chapter 6, Table 6.3.

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