As the innermost planet of the solar system, Mercury is almost always obscured by the sun's harsh glare. Under the best viewing conditions, it never appears as more than a hazy disk in earth-bound telescopes. Last week, as the Mariner 10 passed only 400 miles from the planet, some of the mystery about Mercury was finally dispelled. Radioing back the first close-up pictures of the Mercurian surface, the robot ship unveiled a bleak, cratered and totally forbidding world.
"It's like the moon and it isn't," said Donald E. Gault, one of the scientists monitoring...
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