Perspectives About Mercury: We Know Less Than we Think we Do

Details Perspectives About Mercury: We Know Less Than we Think we Do Perspectives About Mercury: We Know Less Than we Think we Do

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agufm.p51c..04c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2002, abstract #P51C-04

Computer Science

Learning

6235 Mercury

Scientific paper

The Mariner 10 mission to Mercury was an astonishing accomplishment for its day. But our interpretations of its findings were colored by an antiquated perspective about planetary processes. Our present state of knowledge of Mercury, augmented by occasional spurts of interest in the planet and by more recent groundbased observational discoveries, is better -- but it will surely seem antiquated after missions planned to have been executed a decade from now are complete. The composition of Mercury's surface remains essentially unknown (despite efforts by Tom McCord, Faith Vilas, myself and many others). Whether volcanic processes have been wholly absent or significantly important remains unknown. The absolute chronology of Mercury, fixed by inferences about the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), remains insecure as vulcanoids are searched for and the LHB is re-evaluated. We don't know how the planet formed or about its subsequent geophysical evolution, we can't really be sure of the form and behavior of its magnetic field nor why it has one, and we don't understand the processes in its extremely tenuous atmosphere. MESSENGER, Bepi-Colombo, and other prospective investigations of Mercury promise some of the last, great surprises in learning about the basic global aspects of the major planets in our Solar System.

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