What Color is Mercury?
Unlike all of the other planets in the Solar System, Mercury is just bare rock. It does have a tenuous atmosphere, but ground and space-based observations see just the grey rocky color of Mercury.
The surface of Mercury has been unchanged for billions of years, reshaped only by the occasional meteorite impact. In the past, some of the basins were filled in by magma that flowed out of the planet when it still had an active geologic cycle.
The photograph attached to this article provides one of the best true-color images of Mercury that we have. If you could fly over Mercury in your spacecraft, this is essentially what you'd see.
The planet's surface is just textures of grey, with the occasional lighter patch, such as the newly discovered formation of crater and trenches that planetary geologists have named "the spider".
Mercury's coloring is very similar to the Earth's moons. In fact, when you're looking at images of both objects, it's very difficult to tell the two objects apart. Unlike the Moon, however, Mercury lacks the darker areas, or "seas", that were created on the Moon by lava flows.
Filed under: Astronomy
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