Planet Mercury Coloring Pages: 30 Studies of Craters, Cliffs, Polar Ice and Spacecraft Visits

Mercury gets all 30 designs in these coloring pages, instead of a page or two in a tour of the planets. It moves from the whole cratered globe down to single cliffs and hollows, then to the planet’s long nights, its oversized metal core and the spacecraft that mapped it. The art is fine and detailed, with a lot of rock texture, and the title and one sentence sit under each drawing.

The surface, designs 01–15

After the globe come the Caloris Basin, a basin with an inner ring of peaks, a crater with central peaks, bright rays fanning from a fresh crater, and new craters cutting into old ones. Then smooth volcanic plains, a long lobate scarp, shallow hollows, an old volcanic vent and knobby, grooved ground. Design 09 pairs a scarp with a labeled cross-section of the fault beneath it. Designs 13 and 14 show ice in a permanently shadowed polar crater, first as a cutaway and then from above, and 15 is a sunlit landscape under a small, bright sun.

Day, night and the inside, designs 16–22

Design 16 is a cratered plain at night under a few stars, 17 follows the line between day and night, and 18 has rocks throwing long shadows at sunrise. Design 19 cuts the planet open to show the large metal core under a rocky shell. Design 20 is a diagram of three spins for every two orbits, mostly circles, arrows and small labels, so it has less to color than the rest. Design 21 splits one landscape into sunrise, day, sunset and night panels, with the caption that a solar day lasts about 176 Earth days, and 22 shows the very thin exosphere as enlarged particles drifting off the surface.

Spacecraft and observers, designs 23–30

Mariner 10 flies past on 23 and MESSENGER circles the planet on 24, followed by an orbital mapping view with a terrain inset, a laser beam measuring the height of the ground, and two orbiters from the BepiColombo mission. That page is marked as mission design, not the spacecraft’s current setup, and the magnetic field page after it also labels the smaller orbiter as mission design. The set ends at an observatory telescope, with a reminder printed on the page to observe Mercury only when the Sun is below the horizon, and a desk spread with Mercury maps, a globe and a magnifying glass.

The color versions

The color page after each drawing keeps to sandy tans and browns for the ground and leaves the sky white. The exceptions stand out: the night scene in lavender gray, a copper core, pale blue ice in the dark crater, a sunset sky behind the observatory, and gold foil and blue solar panels on the spacecraft. To keep them from printing on the back of a drawing, print single-sided.

Questions

Why does the second file start at page 31?

The footers keep the numbering of the whole 60-page book, so the 16–30 file runs from page 31 to 60. In both files the odd pages are the line drawings and the even pages are their color versions.

Are the landscapes and diagrams exact?

No. The start-here notes call them scientific artistic interpretations, not exact maps, photographs or engineering plans. Sizes, distances, details and the time steps in the diagrams are simplified, and the colors are not measurements.