David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences

Mercury: new views of the Sun’s innermost planet

David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University

Thanks to NASA’s MESSENGER (orbiting Mercury since March 2011) we now know far more about the closest planet to the Sun than was possible from ground-based astronomy and the Mariner-10 flybys in the 1970s.  Through this talk you’ll find out more about what scientists know about this rocky planet, its disproportionately large iron core, and the dynamo processes there generate a magnetic field (unique among the terrestrial planets apart from Earth).