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NASA chose to crash its Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter instead of risk it polluting the possibly habitable oceans of Europa. 11. Mercury is still shrinkingMercury is currently the tiniest world in the solar system (excluding the dwarf planet Pluto, of course), and the second-densest after Earth. And it's only getting smaller and denser.

That changed after the Mercury Surface Area, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft did the very first orbital mission at Mercury, mapping the whole world in high definition and getting a look at the functions on its surface. In 2016, information from MESSENGER exposed cliff-like landforms called fault scarps. Since the fault scarps are relatively little, researchers are sure that they weren't produced that long back and that the planet is still contracting 4.

12. There are mountains on Pluto, Pluto is a small world at the edge of the solar system, so researchers assumed the dwarf planet would have a relatively uniform, crater-pocked environment. That altered when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by in 2015, sending back photos that altered our view of Pluto forever.

However geological activity requires energy, and the source of that energy inside Pluto is a mystery. The sun is too far from Pluto to generate sufficient heat for geological activity, and there are no big worlds nearby that might have triggered such disturbance with gravity. 13. Pluto has a bizarre atmosphere, Pluto's observed environment broke all the forecasts.

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As data from NASA's New Horizons objective flowed in, researchers examined the haze and discovered some surprises there, too. Researchers found about 20 layers in Pluto's environment that are both cooler and more compact than anticipated. This impacts calculations for how quickly Pluto loses its nitrogen-rich environment to area. NASA's New Horizons team found that lots of nitrogen gas leave the dwarf world by the hour, but in some way Pluto can constantly resupply that lost nitrogen.

14.  This Author  are far more typical than we thought, We have actually learnt about Saturn's rings given that telescopes were invented in the 1600s, but it took spacecraft and more effective telescopes integrated in the last 50 years to reveal more. We now know that every world in the external solar system Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune has a ring system.