Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World Book pdf

David Rothery is professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University ,where he chairs a level 2 module Planetary Science and the Search for Life and a level 1 module Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis. He serves on the Open University's Senate. From 1999 to 2004 he worked on the Beagle2 project led by Colin Pillinger. In 2006 he was appointed U.K. lead scientist for the MIXS (Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer) on the joint European Space Agency/JAXA mission to Mercury named BepiColombo.He leads the European Space Agency's Mercury Surface & Composition Working Group in preparation for the BepiColombo mission,which was successfully launched on 20 October 2018. He has been a guest several times on The Sky at Night, and is frequently featured or quoted in TV, radio, print and online news stories about planetary science, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis.

Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World book pdf by David Rothery

A new and detailed picture of Mercury is emerging thanks to NASA’s MESSENGER mission that spent four years in orbit about the Sun’s innermost planet. Comprehensively illustrated by close-up images and other data, the author describes Mercury’s landscapes from a geological perspective: from sublimation hollows, to volcanic vents, to lava plains, to giant thrust faults. He considers what its giant core, internal structure and weird composition have to tell us about the formation and evolution of a planet so close to the Sun. This is of special significance in view of the discovery of so many exoplanets in similarly close orbits about their stars. Mercury generates its own magnetic field, like the Earth (but unlike Venus, Mars and the Moon), and the interplay between Mercury’s and the Sun’s magnetic field affects many processes on its surface and in the rich and diverse exosphere of neutral and charged particles surrounding the planet. There is much about Mercury that we still don’t understand. Accessible to the amateur, but also a handy state-of-the-art digest for students and researchers, the book shows how our knowledge of Mercury developed over the past century of ground-based, fly-by and orbital observations, and looks ahead at the mysteries remaining for future missions to explore.