PA Blog

On September 29th the images from Mercury via the Messenger mission started flowing into NASA.  A high resolution camera continues to snap shots of the little rock closest to the sun. The photographic mission Messenger will not settle into its mapping orbit until 2011.

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. Magnetic tornadoes form when the magnetic field in the solar wind links up to the field generated by a planet, a process called magnetic reconnection. All very unexpected while the surface looks similar to our moon to the naked eye.

“Up until before Messenger’s arrival, we weren’t even sure that volcanism existed on Mercury,” said Brett Denevi of Arizona State University, lead author on a paper describing the evolution of Mercury’s crust. “Now we’re seeing it’s very widespread across the surface.”