LONDON: A depiction of the MESSENGER spacecraft is shown flying over Mercury’s surface displayed in enhanced color. The crater ringed by bright orange is Calvino crater. The enhanced color imagery of Mercury was obtained during the mission’s second Mercury flyby (Photo : NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)
New data from NASA’s Messenger mission proved that an ancient magnetic field on Mercury is four billion years old, making it the oldest confirmed magnetic field of any terrestrial world in the inner solar system.
Published in the journal Science, the study was led by Dr. Catherine Johnson of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
