The Marshall Islands began issuing non-circulating legal tender commemoratives aggressively in the early 1990s, targeting the collector market rather than domestic commerce. These pieces were produced by the Pobjoy Mint under license, with the Islands' government collecting seigniorage from worldwide mail-order sales — a revenue model that had little to do with monetary policy and everything to do with philatelic and numismatic marketing infrastructure built during that decade.
Mercury, the 1994 subject, was one of the Mariner 10 flyby targets — the spacecraft made three passes between 1974 and 1975, the only close observations of the planet until MESSENGER's arrival in 2008.
The Marshall Islands began issuing non-circulating legal tender commemoratives aggressively in the early 1990s, targeting the collector market rather than domestic commerce. These pieces were produced by the Pobjoy Mint under license, with the Islands' government collecting seigniorage from worldwide mail-order sales — a revenue model that had little to do with monetary policy and everything to do with philatelic and numismatic marketing infrastructure built during that decade.
Mercury, the 1994 subject, was one of the Mariner 10 flyby targets — the spacecraft made three passes between 1974 and 1975, the only close observations of the planet until MESSENGER's arrival in 2008.