* Astronomy

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RE: Mercury

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Google Mercury: New NASA Images

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Our solar system's smallest planet has seen an enormous amount of volcanic activity, according to scientists studying information from the latest Mercury flyby.

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Earth's first nearly full look at Mercury reveals that the tiny lifeless planet took a far greater role in shaping itself than was thought, with volcanoes spewing "mysterious dark blue material."
New images from NASA's Messenger space probe should help settle a decades-old debate about what caused parts of Mercury to be somewhat smoother than it should be. NASA released photos Wednesday, from Messenger's fly-by earlier this month, that gave the answer: Lots of volcanic activity, far more than signs from an earlier probe.

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MESSENGER Spacecraft Reveals More Hidden Territory on Mercury
A NASA spacecraft gliding over the battered surface of Mercury for the second time this year has revealed more previously unseen real estate on the innermost planet. The probe also has produced several science firsts and is returning hundreds of new photos and measurements of the planet's surface, atmosphere and magnetic field.

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NASAs Messenger spacecraft zipped past Mercury Monday morning (4:40:21 a.m. EDT for those of you whore truly curious), brushing within 125 miles (200 km) of its Sun-baked surface, and the pictures recorded during the flyby streamed back to Earth early the next day. Its an incredible landscape cratered plains splashed with bright craters that will keep the missions geologists giddily busy for a long, long time.

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NASA's Messenger spacecraft early this morning beamed back new views of Mercury taken Monday during its second close encounter with the planet.

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NASA's Messenger spacecraft will zip past the surface of Mercury on Monday, allowing it to glimpse a third of the planet that has not yet been seen close up.
The flyby will take the car-sized probe within 200 kilometres of the surface, at a speed of more than 24,000 km per hour.
This is the probe's second close look at the scarred, rocky planet. During a flyby on 14 January, Messenger captured detailed images of a previously unseen 20% of the planet's surface.

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Data from NASAs Messenger spacecrafts first flyby of Mercury has suggested that the spider-like Pantheon Fossae formation, a radiating web of troughs located in the giant Caloris Basin, is directly linked to an impact crater at the centre of the web.
The Caloris Basin is the youngest-known large impact basin on Mercury.
The basin was discovered in 1974 during Mariner 10s flyby, but the centre of the basin had not been seen until Messengers first flyby on 14th January.

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MESSENGER Science Team members are busy studying in detail the newly discovered volcanoes on Mercury. This figure, recently published in Science magazine, shows a NAC mosaic of the largest volcano currently identified on Mercury and a geologic sketch map of the major features in the surrounding area. The irregularly-shaped depressions are believed to correspond to volcanic vents, and the margin of the dome-like feature marks the outer limits of lava flows from the vents that are thought to have covered up the underlying surface of hummocky plains.

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