Small Yet Mighty Mercury Still Holds Many Mysteries

[Makuser]

With the upcoming Mercury transit, I thought that all of you might enjoy this article too. Rockets roared to life on August 3, 2004, as an intrepid spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral and set out to uncover mysteries about the Solar System’s smallest planet: Mercury. The Messenger craft—short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geo-chemistry and Ranging—rocketed toward the dense, little planet with big plans. Mariner 10—the first spacecraft to visit multiple planets and use gravity assist to fling itself from one to another—swept past Mercury three times in the 1970s. It returned striking photos of the planet's surface and revealed what we know about temperature changes, giving scientists and astronomers a basic understanding of processes. Only two missions have visited the mysterious little planet tucked against the sun. Mariner's images of Mercury opened up a whole new world for exploration. Messenger would give scientists much, much more data along with surprises astronomers could never have imagined. Now, a new mission, BepiColombo is racing toward Mercury and will expand our understanding of one of the solar system's most intriguing planets. You can read this entire interesting article here, at:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/ ... t-mercury/