The New York Times (6/17, A23, Chang, Subscription Publication) reports new results from the Messenger spacecraft orbiting around Mercury “is painting a more vibrant picture of the solar system’s innermost planet.” Scientists, reporting the finds at a NASA news conference, explained how the planet has unique features in the solar system “and its mineralogy is vastly different from the Moon’s.” Scientists have also discovered Mercury’s magnetic field is different in the northern and southern hemisphere. These findings “could reveal how Mercury formed and changed over the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system, which in turn could help astronomers understand the panoply of Earth-size planets around other stars and the possibility of conditions friendly for life on them.” Scientists have already been able to eliminate one of three current theories explaining how Mercury formed.