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This is an archive of AGU's GeoSpace blog through 1 July 2020. New content about AGU research can be found on Eos and the AGU newsroom.

You are browsing the archive for Mercury Archives - GeoSpace.

3 September 2019

Mercury’s ancient magnetic field likely evolved over time

Mercury’s ancient magnetic poles were far from the location of its poles today, implying its magnetic field, like Earth’s, changed over time, a new study says.

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18 September 2018

Mercury and its depressions

One of the most surprising discoveries of the NASA’s Messenger mission was the presence of unusual, bright, irregular and rimless flat-floored depressions on the surface of Mercury. These depressions, called hollows, are usually found on crater walls, rims, floors and central peaks. Since the hollows appear fresh, they may be actively forming today through a mechanism that could involve the loss of volatile compounds, but understanding how the hollows formed is still a major challenge for scientists.

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19 September 2017

Researchers identify ‘substantial’ amount of Mercury’s water ice

Researchers have identified three new craters and four small-scale cold traps on Mercury filled with surface ice and suspect the planet may harbor many smaller patches of exposed ice too small to observe directly. The newly observed ice makes a substantial contribution to the amount of exposed ice thought to exist on Mercury’s surface, which the researchers estimate to be approximately 3,400 square kilometers (1,313 square miles), or just smaller than Rhode Island in size.

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18 April 2017

Mercury’s craters offer clues to planet’s contraction

Craters serve as time-markers for the faults because they can be dated by how degraded they appear. The more degraded looking craters are older. Those that have sharper features are younger, and those with bright rays of debris radiating around them are youngest of all.

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9 September 2015

Mercury’s movements give scientists peek inside the planet

The first measurements of Mercury’s movements from a spacecraft orbiting the planet reveal new insights about the makeup of the solar system’s innermost world and its interactions with other planetary bodies.

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15 February 2011

A First for the Inner Frontier: Q&A with Sean Solomon on the MESSENGER mission

Sean C. Solomon, Principal Investigator for the MESSENGER mission and a former president of the American Geophysical Union, spoke with GeoSpace about the mission’s goals, Mercury’s potential to surprise, and his own path in research. He gave GeoSpace a sneak preview of topics he might be discussing during his talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this Sunday in Washington, D.C.

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