Jason,

Here are a few notes on your notes

> outer solar system which is why I most provide links to

Do you have any interest in the Kuperoids? Now that
is a very interesting field, especially the Plutinos. Carl
Sagan mentioned a common thought of the then
hypothetical kuperoids (postulated due to "object Kowal"
now known as Chiron being discovered then). It went
like this: if those chunks could be brought in, by whatever
means, the volatile problem would be almost solved.

The difficulty is, of course, that even if the means is
found -- even with a gravity assist, the rotational period
is so slow that timescales would probably be prohibitive.
(Basic celestial mechanics of objects farther away having
an increasingly long orbit period, squared I think).


other sites
> with information on Mercury. I guess you can say my background is
> planetary science since that is what I plan to major in (though I
> don't think University of Arizona has that as a major so I will
> probably major in Geophysics).

That is just about the best place to study.



The reason I am hoping to go to the
> University of Arizona is because I will be working there next summer
> with Dr. McEwen and his team, analyzing images sent back from Galileo
> of Io (notice that my website is all about Io :)


That explains a few things. I am personally aware that
people actually involved in the voyages of discovery
are really wrapped up in everything. I suppose it has to
be this way as there is a lot of money depending on the
effort and little money available to error prone experiments.

Sometimes it has been very difficult to conduct email with
them, but in your case there are years in between your
real work and now.

Good luck.

Returning to Mercury, it is a difficult place to go and the
(seeming) lack of volatiles, especially ones that make
nice pictures because it is in the dark, is a good part of it.

To the layman the place looks like the moon and that is
very boring (to them). I mean, most people really are not
geologist or geographers even as a hobbist.

As mentioned, I take a more practical point of view,
mainly that it is a potentially valuable piece of real estate.
The main selling point, a place of discussion for me later,
is that it is so hot. That has a key advantage in one area
of being useful to mankind, and I do not mean because of
the solar electricity, etc.

Moving on to an issue more to your liking, Mercury is
rather flat. A few rises of up to a kilometer or two,
especially along the rift zone and a few big craters, but
mostly it is of Pennslyvania blue ridge type moderate
incline gradient, saturation and frequency,
excepting that it is almost wholly related to the heavy
cratering of the first 800 million years or so.

The reason for this flatness is believed to be the lack of
crater impacts compared to that on the moon and the
greater gravity (less gravity and the rock can make
a bigger crater before slumping back, slumping back
less as well). "Gardening" of the Mercury "soil" by
smaller impacts should also be less, but I have wondered
about that one. I mean, although the other planets (Earth
& Moon, Venus) take in many if not most, for micro meteors of the the
cometary parabolic orbits the
smaller orbital radius of Mercury should greatly increase
the amounts of those grains of sand/dust impact. So
there should be as much or more dust than that on
our Moon (a centimeter or so).


Surprisingly, this could be of considerably more than
merely academic concern.

I encourage Jason or anyone else to further this thread.

David