May Meeting

How did Mercury form? New constraints from the MESSENGER mission

Mercury's high mean density implies that this planet has a disproportionately large metal core. What accounts for this unusual interior structure? Maybe Mercury's outermost rocks have been stripped or scorched away, or maybe Mercury is made of different stuff than the other planets. Such simple explanations have been complicated by geophysical observations from the Mariner 10 mission as well as geological and geochemical results from the ongoing MESSENGER mission. The exciting new results from MESSENGER (and the exciting old results from Mariner 10) will be reviewed in the context of Mercury's genesis.

Will Vaughan is a graduate student in planetary science at Brown University. Will's interests include the Moon and Mercury.