Delaying Death: Mercury Spacecraft Firing Engines To Stay Up Until 2015

By Elizabeth Howell November 28, 2014
Delaying Death: Mercury Spacecraft Firing Engines To Stay Up Until 2015

  • Mercury's high density compared to other planets remains a mystery. MESSENGER investigations found a surface that didn't have a lot of iron in it, but lots of volatile materials such as sodium and sulfur.

  • The surface had volcanoes on it and still has water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the poles.

  • Its magnetic field produces weird effects that are still being examined. NASA speaks of "unexplained bursts of electrons and highly variable distributions of different elements" in its tenuous atmosphere, called an exosphere.