INMO, Mercury, with is craters, looks a bit like our moon. Well, a lot like our moon
Sean Solomon. the mission chief scientist said "Mercury has had an exposed surface for at least 3.5 to 4 billion years and some of those surfaces are extremely cratered to the point where there are so many craters they start to obscure one another," Mr Solomon told the Associated Press that it is "surprising how many secondary craters there are. Those are craters created by the falling soil kicked up from space rock collisions. Those initial space rock crashes 'throw out a lot of material in the explosive process,'"
Mercury is the closets planet to the sun and the hottest planet in our solar system. It is definitely not a candidate for future settlements or for mining of natural resources with the use of special robots. So why is this a big deal?
Well, besides the wow factor of successfully sending a space craft to a sister planet, and the pleasure of observing the pictures transmitted back, the study of other planets is important in providing us knowledge of our solar system and giving us a better understanding of how our own planet was formed. But the wow factor should not be discounted in anyway. The exploration of space, even for the lay observer, who limits his activity to watching the NASA videos, is an adventure of the mind and the heart, and frankly, space exploration is one of the better things that we as human beings do,