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 "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." Continue reading