New data suggests that Mercury has undergone much more dynamic processes than previously believed and that its core is unlike any of the other rocky planets in our solar system.
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the solar system's smallest and innermost planet for just over a year, has beamed back plenty of surprises for scientists here on Earth.
"I thought the surface of Mercury would turn out to be complex and the interior simple," said planetary scientist Maria Zuber of MIT, who is a member of the MESSENGER team and co-author of two new papers on the planet that appear March 21 in Science. "Instead, our data has been such a surprise that we kept thinking we were interpreting it wrong."
Mercury's tiny size and heavily cratered surface suggested that the planet cooled into an inert lump soon after its formation 4.5 billion years ago. The two new papers show that the planet had active geologic and tectonic processes occurring until at least the planet's middle age, around 2 billion years ago.
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