article_snippet: (CNN)As planets go, Mercury doesn't get a lot of love.
article_snippet: People spend more time on Google searching for Queen singer Freddy Mercury than Mercury Mercury ... and Freddie's been gone for nearly a quarter-century.
article_snippet: Not even NASA spends much time there, making it the least-explored inner planet in the solar system.
article_snippet: Compared with our own moon, which is about the same size, Mercury reflects much less light.
article_snippet: : There's a lot more carbon dust thrown off from comets close to the sun, where Mercury orbits -- about 50 times as much for Mercury as for NASA moon, Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brown University and the Planetary Sciences Institute say.
highlights_snippet: Mercury was "painted black" by millions of years of micrometeorites, researchers say .
  