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Mercury Had Quite The Explosive Past, Spacecraft Analysis Shows
The different colors in this MESSENGER image of Mercury indicate the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up the planet’s surface. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Mercury — a planet once thought to have no volcanism at all — likely had a very active past, a new analysis of images from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft shows. After looking at 51 vents across Mercury, the team concluded that they show different amounts of erosion — hinting that the explosions happened at different times in the planet’s history.
“If [the explosions] happened over a brief period and then stopped, you’d expect all the vents to be degraded by approximately the same amount,” stated Goudge, a graduate geology student at Brown University who led the research.
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Read the rest of Mercury Had Quite The Explosive Past, Spacecraft Analysis Shows (291 words)
© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/111074/mercury-had-quite-the-explosive-past-spacecraft-analysis-shows/
