Mercury Visited By First Spacecraft In 33 Years

[FSTargetDrone]

Minor update, mostly saying everything looks good. Now they are just waiting for the pictures and other data.

Messenger Flies Past Mercury in Preparation for Permanent Mission
By Jessica Berman

Washington

15 January 2008

The U.S. space agency spacecraft Messenger swooped within 199-kilometers of the planet Mercury, Monday, in preparation for a permanent orbit, beginning in 2011. Messenger, which is operated by remote control from Earth, will soon begin beaming data back which scientists hope will answer questions about the planet closest to the Sun. Jessica Berman reports.

The unmanned spacecraft was launched by NASA in August, 2004. Messenger, stands for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging.

Eric Finnegan is systems engineer for NASA's Messenger Mission. Finnegan says Messenger made a nighttime approach toward Mercury at nearly 26,000 kilometers per hour. The planet's gravitational pull slowed the spacecraft by 8,000 kilometers per hour for its eventual descent into orbit around Mercury in 2011.

Finnegan says Messenger sent back preliminary photos of the approach. He says the spacecraft will begin beam back more detailed imagery and data within the next day or two.

"We're very, very excited. We had a very successful flyby today," he said. "We'll still still be waiting for the next day or so to get down imagery but our initial indications flying by the planet using just radio beacon information looks good."

Planetary scientists hope the $450 million mission will help them answer key questions about Mercury, a tiny planet with temperatures that swing between 315 degrees in the daytime to minus 180 degrees at night.

Astronomers say the planet is heavily cratered and has a large iron core.

"Mercury is really an oddball," said Louis Friedman who heads the Planetary Society. "It is a very dense solar system object. It's very small. It's in toward the Sun. It's only about the size of the Earth's moon, a little larger. And, as such, how did it form? And however it formed is going to tell us something about planet formation."

Friedman says the Milky Way is like a jigsaw puzzle; he says only when all the pieces are in place, and all the planets are explored, will astronomers understand how the galaxy was formed.

"Mercury is a very, very dense and very heavy object, and therefore getting a really good handle on that density and its mass and associated size will help us in trying to determine what happened at the time of planetary formation," he said. "How did it reach that size, how did it evolve and how did assume its final orbit?"

Messenger is about halfway through its journey to put it in permanent orbit around Mercury in 2011.

But, until then, there will be another flyby this October and again in September 2009.

[Broomstick]

Why does everyone always act like there's going to be some new and great discovery? It's a somewhat larger and sunbaked version of the moon. At best there MIGHT be something useful in the crust but it's probably not worth the effort to get it...

First of all, some us just like to look over the next hill to see what's there.

Others have commented on Mercury being of very different composition than the moon. It's like comparing a ball of styrofoam and a ball of iron that just happen to be of similar size and color - the resemblance is superficial.

These probes aren't really to set up mining claims. They really are a matter of gathering raw data.

Alright fine! It's partially interesting... Better use of money than sending another probe to Mars and expecting it not to tell you that it's a giant lifeless desert this time.

Although the prospect of life on Mars is looking dismal there is still a remote possibility of some sort of what we would consider an extremophile. Even if we find no life now we might find fossils. Even if we find nothing of the sort, the search has lead to methods and engineering that could have applications in remote and hazardous environments here on Earth.

Why is it that everyone always takes my criticism of the expensive exploration of the ass end of nowhere to confirm that it is in fact a lifeless rock as 99.999999999999999999999999% of our conclusions predicted as against the space program?

You must admit the way you phrased that - "ass end of nowhere to be confirm that it is in fact a lifeless rock" - is rather negative.

It's OK to feel that there are better things to do than explore space, but don't expect a warm reception for that opinion here.

It costs money to explore, the same amount of money could be applied to something a lot closer to home. I'm pretty sure we actually posses the ability to mine near Earth asteroids...and if NASA wasn't completely retarded we could probably manage something a lot more useful in orbit than the glorified hamster cage of a "lab" that is the ISS...

Sure, we could have something like the even smaller "hamster cage" of Mir or Skylab. I'm sorry to say that I think, at present, the ISS probably is about as good as we can do. It's fucking expensive to put people into space, and it's the life support that complicates it and drive the cost up orders of magnitude. At least with the ISS, if something goes severely wrong we have at least a chance of evacuating the personnel back to safety. A mining outpost on a NEA? Chances of a safe evacuation not nearly so good, nor is it likely to be feasible to send help.

You know, the scientists and engineers that put satellites into orbit and men on the moon were the pioneers of the technology that put weather satellites and GPS into orbit and THOSE are used by ordinary people all over the world every day of the year, aren't they? Or don't you think the two are related? Or should we go back to less accurate maps, people geting lost more easily, it being difficult to find the lost, and far less accurate weather forecasting that affected everything from shipping to passenger airlines to how long we had to evacuate people out of the path of killer hurricanes?

As for mining "near Earth asteroids" -- well, we need the navigational ability (sending probes to other planets taught us that), given the cost of doing anything in space we need to know we're going somewhere useful before we launch (doesn't that sound like what we've done with orbiters and the Mars rovers?), and we need to know how to land safely on such bodies (something a remote probe has done once, and that was quite recently). Even if we find nothing "useful" in your terms, sending out these exploratory probes drive the development of technology to do what you do find useful. Right now, keeping people alive and healthy (both mentally and physically) on the long voyages necessary to go anywhere in the solar system is the biggest roadblock to manned exploration. Maybe we'll develop robot miners before we get past that obstacle, maybe not, but I see no reason to halt remote exploration while we deal with how to deal with the fragility of human life in space. Especially since development of remote technology for space leads to other applications here on Earth, such as deep sea exploration or robotic mining so people are less exposed to the hazards of working deep underground.

[FSTargetDrone]

First of all, some us just like to look over the next hill to see what's there.

This is quite right. Exploration for its own sake, hoping we may find some new and unexpected information, if well worth the time and effort. Especially given the relatively tiny amount that is spent as compared to lesser undertakings.

I think a lot of people don't appreciate that, for as advanced as the space program is, we are really just at the beginning of what we may potentially accomplish. In less than 70 years, we went from the first powered, heavier-than-air aircraft's successful flight to landing on the moon and exploring it. That's pretty damn impressive, but there's so much more to go, to see and to do.

[Zablorg]

I think a lot of people don't appreciate that, for as advanced as the space program is, we are really just at the beginning of what we may potentially accomplish. In less than 70 years, we went from the first powered, heavier-than-air aircraft's successful flight to landing on the moon and exploring it. That's pretty damn impressive, but there's so much more to go, to see and to do.

I'm afraid I'm sort of going to have to butt in and be pessimistic now. Once we've explored our solar system, what then? It strikes me as being quite a finite area of research.

[Enforcer Talen]

Colonizing it

[Zablorg]

Colonizing it

In 70 years, I personally doubt we'll be in any state to do so.

[FSTargetDrone]

Formerly unseen side, revealed!

MESSENGER’s First Look at Mercury’s Previously Unseen Side

Release Date: January 15, 2008

When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury three times in 1974 and 1975, the same hemisphere was in sunlight during each encounter. As a consequence, Mariner 10 was able to image less than half the planet. Planetary scientists have wondered for more than 30 years about what spacecraft images might reveal about the hemisphere of Mercury that Mariner 10 never viewed.

On January 14, 2008, the MESSENGER spacecraft observed about half of the hemisphere missed by Mariner 10. This image was snapped by the Wide Angle Camera, part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument, about 80 minutes after MESSENGER's closest approach to Mercury (2:04 pm EST), when the spacecraft was at a distance of about 27,000 kilometers (about 17,000 miles). The image shows features as small as 10 kilometers (6 miles) in size. This image was taken through a filter sensitive to light near the red end of the visible spectrum (750 nm), one of a sequence of images taken through each of MDIS’s 11 filters.

Like the previously mapped portion of Mercury, this hemisphere appears heavily cratered. It also reveals some unique and distinctive features. On the upper right is the giant Caloris basin, including its western portions never before seen by spacecraft. Formed by the impact of a large asteroid or comet, Caloris is one of the largest, and perhaps one of the youngest, basins in the Solar System. The new image shows the complete basin interior and reveals that it is brighter than the surrounding regions and may therefore have a different composition. Darker smooth plains completely surround Caloris, and many unusual dark-rimmed craters are observed inside the basin. Several other multi-ringed basins are seen in this image for the first time. Prominent fault scarps (large ridges) lace the newly viewed region.

Other images obtained during the flyby will reveal surface features in color and in much more detail. Collectively, these images and measurements made by other MESSENGER instruments will soon provide a detailed global view of the surface of Mercury, yielding key information for understanding the formation and geologic history of the innermost planet.

[Darth Servo]

Formerly unseen side, revealed!

Call me appathetic but it doesn't look all that much different than the side we had already seen.

[Broomstick]

But... but... it's a COMPLETELY different arrangement of craters, dust, and lumpy ridgey bits!

[FSTargetDrone]

Bah, I suppose you all want color pictures.