Mercury flyby

[GoodGame]

NASA's MESSENGER probe did another flyby of Mercury:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gen...cury’s_Western_hemisphere,_other_new_features


Interesting finds: Mercury has a very mixed-up crust, including a mysterious material that is red with blue tinges. By 2011, when MESSENGER orbits Mercury, they hope to get a better idea of what the bluish material is.

“The bottom line is that the crust is very heterogeneous,” explains MESSENGER coinvestigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. Because the flyby was too brief to engage all of MESSENGER’s science tools, scientists will have to wait until MESSENGER is in orbit before they know the makeup of the blue stuff. Robinson says that he is looking forward to getting MESSENGER into orbit, so that “I can stop saying ‘blue material.’ ”

 

[lndm]

I'd like to be the first to predict it's copper.

 

[Truronian]

My money's on cobalt.

 

[GoodGame]

I'd bet that since Mercury is the highest iron content planet in the solar system, and a very exothermic environment, that it's some form of iron.

Question: if the Near Infrared is basically red light to humans, then is a blue light, in a Near Infrared filter, analogistically just on the left end of the Near Infrared (which in this case would be around 800 cm-1)? So the blue tint is really near near infrared?