NASA probe shows Mercury more dynamic than thought

NASA probe shows Mercury more dynamic than thought

news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – 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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"Mysterious dark blue material"??? "Filled-in Craters"???
What else shows up blue on a planet?

More from the article below:

"Astronomers used to dismiss Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, as mere "dead rock," little more than a target for cosmic collisions that shaped it, said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.
"Now, it's looking a lot more interesting," said Zuber, who has experiments on the Messenger probe. "It's an awful lot of volcanic material."
New images of filled-in craters — one the size of the Baltimore-Washington area and filled in with more than a mile deep of cooled lava — show that 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, Mercury was more of a volcanic hotspot than the moon ever was, Zuber said.

But it isn't just filled-in craters. Using special cameras, the probe showed what one scientist called "the mysterious dark blue material." It was all over the planet. That led Arizona State University geologist Mark Robinson to speculate that the mineral is important but still unknown stuff ejected from Mercury's large core in the volcanic eruptions."

I am very interested in what that mysterious dark blue material could be, I am also interested in the filled-in craters.
Anybody want to take a gander?

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Nobody else finds the mysterious dark blue interesting?
Nobody has an idea on what it could be?

As to what blue mineral it is, take your pick the list is really long.

www.webmineral.com...

Very interesting/strange.

reply to post by SectionEight


ok but could it be water?
I know my CT brain is working overtime but could it be h2o filling up the craters?

[edit on 29-10-2008 by SEEWHATUDO]

I have thinking about this crazy theory lately that the solar system works like a centrifuge, except in reverse, in that the heaviest materials are in the center, and the lighter materials in the outer reaches.

This would mean that when our solar system formed, the heaviest atomic structures clustered in the middle, creating our sun, and the less heavier atomic structures formed the planets, with the heaviest materials forming the planets closest to the Sun, and lighter materials creating the outer planets. This is why the outer planets are all so big in comparrisson to the inner planets. The heavier atomic structures create so much gravitational force, and therefore pressure and heat at the center of the planet, that they can only form to a certain size, or else the gravitational forces will tear the planet apart, the planets with heavy atomic structures in the core are limited in size.

This would explain a lot of phenomenon, like the extremely thick atmosphere of Venus. Mercury then would be this extremely dense little planet, whose mass allows it to maintain its orbit so close to the sun. This would also mean that our periodic table has a great deal of expansion to be done.

Erm the blue mineral is only very light blue in reality, as in slightly 'not red'... it even says in the article that it was observed through a special camera.

It could be iron?

Originally posted by SEEWHATUDO
reply to post by SectionEight

 

ok but could it be water?
I know my CT brain is working overtime but could it be h2o filling up the craters?

[edit on 29-10-2008 by SEEWHATUDO]

Well from an unscientific perspective, if that was water where is the evaporative evidence? There would have to be a cycle of at least liquid to vapor and back again. It is close to the sun and hot. Mineral deposits from the volcanic flows are far more likely.

Copper gentlemen.

Have you ever grown copper crystals?

Copper sulfate crystals?