Mercury is the solar system's Greenland. We know it's there, we've heard some interesting stuff about it, but we just don't give it a whole lot of thought -- and that has long included NASA.
Nobody's slouch at sending unmanned spacecraft all over the cosmic neighborhood, NASA had launched just a single mission to Mercury in 30 years -- the Mariner 10 probe, which made three flybys of the planet in the 1970s. In 2004, that changed, as NASA launched the far nimbler, far more sophisticated Messenger spacecraft, which arrived in orbit around Mercury a year ago and has been surveying the planet with laser altimeters, gravitational instruments, cameras and more ever since. Now, a pair of papers appearing in the online edition of Science make it clear that the long overdue return was amply worth the effort. Mercury, it turns out, is a far more dynamic -- and far less predictable -- place than we once believed.
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