Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "The Crater on Mercury That Defied Conventional Models | MESSENGER Images Part 2" video.

  1. Because there's no point in doing that.
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  2. Earth is hit by about 5000 tons worth of meteors per year.
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  3.  @stephenphillips2206  You're welcome. Most of that 5000 tons is tiny particles of dust (as you see in meteor showers).
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  4. The melting point of a material does not change in a vacuum. That's not an assumption: this is easy to test here on Earth, so we did test it.
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  5.  @jamiebraswell5520  You`ve never talked to an actual scientist then. Any scientist is aware of the limitations of our knowledge, and ready to be proven wrong. The trouble is, journalists don't often bother to convey this in their reports, so phrases like "to the best of our knowledge" are omitted and an impression of certainty is created.
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  6. The nice thing about science is that we don't have to witness an event to be able to get a decent picture of an event. Craters are formed by a finite number of physical processes, which we have studied in detail here on Earth, and we've created and validated models. These models can then be used to on other planets. If we encounter a crater there, we can use its features to reconstruct what happens. Are we 100% certain? No. No scientist ever is. We can however a. eliminate everything we've disproven, and b.offer a hypothesis that is based on solid data. Are we guessing blindly? Far from it.
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  7. No. There's one charlatan hawking a book by making wild claims.
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  8.  @stephenphillips2206  Yep, most of it isn't a threat. You still get the occasional Chelyabinsk Meteor to liven things up.
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