The planet Mercury, as seen by the MESSENGER mission
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Mercury has barely any boulders. Rocks five metres across or bigger are far less abundant on the planet’s surface than researchers expected, and figuring out why could help us understand conditions on the closest planet to the sun.
Because Mercury is extremely difficult to reach with a spacecraft, we have very few high-resolution images of its surface, most of them from NASA’s Messenger mission, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015. Mikhail Kreslavsky at the University of California, Santa …
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