Mercury has almost no boulders on its surface and we're not sure why

By Leah Crane

The satellite Mercury, arsenic seen by the Messenger mission

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Mercury has hardly immoderate boulders. Rocks of astatine slightest 5 metres crossed are acold little abundant connected the planet’s aboveground than expected, and figuring retired wherefore could assistance america recognize conditions connected the closest satellite to the sun.

Because Mercury is highly hard to scope with a spacecraft, we person fewer high-resolution images of its surface, astir of them from NASA’s Messenger mission, which orbited the satellite from 2011 to 2015. Mikhail Kreslavsky astatine the University of California, Santa Cruz, …

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