From Wired Science:Mercury was once seen as a cold, dead little world, spinning around the sun unchanged for the past 4 billion years.
No longer: Observations from the Messenger spacecraft say it’s anything but.
NASA’s orbiter is sending back evidence of massive volcanism, strange impact craters and magnetic tornadoes that funnel plasma directly from the sun to the planet’s surface.
“It’s definitely not this picture of an ancient world where everything that happened to it happened billions of years ago and nothing happened since then,” said Tom Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. “We’re seeing a very dynamic planet that has a lot going on today.”
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