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Messenger Discovers "Spider" Crater on Mercury

Posted by Soulskill on from the hey-look-at-that dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property brings us a Washington Post story which discusses how scientists are finding surprises among the pictures sent back from Mercury by the Messenger spacecraft. In particular, images depicting a crater with over 100 troughs radiating out from it are stumping researchers. The crater is referred to as 'The Spider', and it occupies a basin that has turned out to be larger than once thought. NASA also has a discussion of the crater. The Messenger craft began taking the up-close photos earlier this month. From the Post: "Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet's surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury's earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago."

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Probably Moon was formed later by anandsr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think the difference is due to their formation. Mercury I believe was formed naturally out of gas and elements like Earth, and so has volcanoes etc. While Moon is probably a breakaway part of earth, which got formed just before solidification of earth started. So that Moon never had a hot core, and so there was no volcanic activity.

  2. My Forensic Opinion by flyneye · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just from what I can see,it looks as though perhaps Mercury isn't as solid underneath its crust as perhaps thought.It looks to me like it was hit causing compression,sunk,then pressure pushed back up causing the cracks which may or may not have guided lava.Mercury,a bad place to visit and I wouldn't wanna live there.

    --
    *Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
  3. I'm not Roland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Just FYI, I'm not Roland (and he's still submitting stories, BTW). Those guys were out whoring their blogs. I don't have a blog to whore, so I link to things like the EFF's donate page or currently the "I wouldn't steal" page.

    So you might say I'm submitting stories to raise awareness of a cause, not unlike NYCL. I don't make a dime from this like Roland & co. were trying to. Also, you may notice that the name is unregistered. Feel free to submit stories in my name. You could consider it a form of living what I believe, because I'm even willing to share my identity.

    Basically, it's quite easy to get stories on Slashdot: just trawl the other tech news sites and try to make a semi-decent summary of what you just read, then think up a good headline (which is often _the_ most important part, you can see in this story that they dumped my summary entirely, but they kept the headline). Just pick only the stories that interest you the most. There are LOADS of crap stories that aren't very interesting, but if you submit 3-5 a day (less when there's no real news) you'll probably get at least one story on Slashdot per day.

    If nothing else, it's a fun thing to do while slacking off at work :-) Oh, and there are four stories at this moment. I think that's a personal best.