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Spacecraft Beams Back Images of Mercury

Posted: 2008-01-17 20:28:57
Filed Under: Science News
Space.com


Scientists are sifting through their first new views of the planet Mercury in more than three decades thanks to images beamed home by NASA's MESSENGER probe.

The car-sized spacecraft zipped past Mercury in a Monday flyby and is relaying more than 1,200 new images and other data back to eager scientists on Earth.

"Now it's time for the scientific payoff," MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington told SPACE.com after the flyby. "It's just a complete mix of results that we're going to get."

In one new image, released today, the planet's stark surface is shown peppered with small craters, each less than a mile (1.6 km) in diameter and carved into an area about 300 miles across. MESSENGER used its narrow-angle camera to photograph the scene, which is dominated by a large, double-ringed crater dubbed Vivaldi after the Italian composer. While the crater was last seen by NASA's Mariner 10 probe, MESSENGER's camera observed it with unprecedented detail, researchers said.

Another new view reveals the first look at the half of Mercury left uncharted by Mariner 10.

"It is already clear that MESSENGER's superior camera will tell us much that could not be resolved even on the side of Mercury viewed by Mariner's vidicon camera in the mid-1970s," said MESSENGER researchers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in a Wednesday statement. JHUAPL engineers built MESSENGER for NASA and are managing its $446 million mission for the space agency.

MESSENGER, short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, trained its seven instruments on Mercury on Monday for the first of three planned flybys to guide itself toward a March 18, 2011, arrival into orbit around the small, rocky planet. The mission is the first to visit Mercury since 1975, when Mariner 10 made its third and final swing past the planet.

"These flybys are the only time that we fly by the surface of Mercury at low latitude near the equator," Solomon said.

MESSENGER is due to make a second rendezvous at Mercury in October, then swing by on third pass in September 2009. The probe launched in August 2004 and flew by Earth once and Venus twice during its 4.9 billion-mile trek toward Mercury orbit.

During Monday's flyby, MESSENGER skimmed just 124 miles above Mercury's surface and snapped photographs of about half of the estimated 55 percent of the planet that remained uncharted after Mariner 10's mission. In addition to imagery, the probe is expected to return a wealth of new observations made by its seven instruments to scrutinize Mercury's surface composition, magnetic field, tenuous atmosphere, unusually high density and other features.

"It will take upwards of a week to get all of the data off the spacecraft," said MESSENGER systems engineer Eric Finnegan before the Monday flyby. "Within that week, the scientists will start receiving some of the images of the flyby and processing that data."

Researchers hope MESSENGER's findings will not only answer long-standing questions about Mercury, but also shed new light on how planets formed in the early days of the solar system. The probe will generate complete maps of Mercury's surface, measure the planet's gravitational field and search for any hints of ice at the bottom of permanently shadowed craters near the poles as part of its mission.

"I just can't wait," said Mark Robinson, a MESSENGER science team member at the University of Arizona. "I want to see what's around the corner."

(c) 1999-2007 Imaginova Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

2008-01-17 17:07:21
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Recent Comments

1 - 10 of 1836
1836 comments

bollywoggle37 02:21:52 PM May 21 2008

Thats exactly what it looks, I've been out there in my friends UFO and we have seen many wonderful things............oh by the way keep your shades down,,,,,,,we have seen some repulsive things too LOL

bertie111 01:37:00 PM Jan 21 2008

Looks like another moon!

rwnamvet68 09:11:00 PM Jan 19 2008

jimgreen911911 05:55:20 PM Jan 19 2008

Report This! You have been turned in rose to aol and they are tracing you now.Everyone if you click report this they will take her off. Sell your trash some where else

---------------------------------
i am a young and handsome man from us. i just think

Good face slap son........ when they report you, just change your name again and go on.
I give you a C- in spelling
an F in grammer
But you get an A for presistance

jearley 05:16:19 PM Jan 19 2008

skhpldk 04:30:34 PM Jan 19 2008

Why is it that these billion dollar space cameras are always black and white???

Its the nature of the CCDs that are used to make the photos. They only record brightness (# of photons). To make a color picture, you combine the brightness at three different wavelengths, red-green-blue, and then combine the images using filters to make a color picture. If you look carefully at your computer screen, you will see that the pixels are just that, red, green and blue. Your eyes see RGB (actually the green is closer to yellow) and combine those 'colors' in your brain to see all of the other colors. So, in a sense, a CCD works just like your eye. These photos of Mercury may well be in color, but the planet might be just as the images show- shades of gray.

skhpldk 04:30:34 PM Jan 19 2008

Why is it that these billion dollar space cameras are always black and white???

jearley 03:33:42 PM Jan 19 2008

new44moon comment: This commnet is really far-fetched. You're saying that mankind is going to establish a mining operation on Mercury? Will dynamite work there? Oh wait you can't light a stick of dynamite on Mercury, the atmosphere there is too thin.
Sorry to take so long to reply. First, you're wrong about the dynamite, as it is set off using electric charges these days, and anyway, dynamite is not much used for mining anymore- there are safer explosives. I would expect that perhaps 150-200 years from now for much of the solar system to be at least explored, if not possessing small outposts, dissident colonies, etc. Most mining on Mercury would be robotic. As to 'far-fetched', well, I beg to differ. Well within the next 20 years or so, the first permanent commercial space ventures will be in orbit. I mean manned ventures, as there are already many private unmanned satellites up there. Bigelow (sp?) will have the first private space station in just a few years- he already launc

kalliji 11:52:21 AM Jan 19 2008

Intelligent design - I don't think so. Truth is, no one knows how we got here. Creation myth/intelligent design, doesn't even remotely make any sense. I'm just enjoying the beauty of these images. But I certainly don't credit them to any superstitious nonsense.

jonbon51788 02:35:21 AM Jan 19 2008

Wow, I can't help but be baffled by the greatness of God's creations. Just observing each and everyone of those images blows my mind. How complex and precise the universe is. It just makes me wonder how can anyone after looking at such images deny the fact that we and our universe is not by intelligent design. Absolutely breathtaking pictures. And I agree with what Rumours said, we have only begun to even scratch the surface of investigating what lies beyond earth. There are so many possiblites. There could be another earth, billions of lightyears away, with people just like us, wondering the same thoughts. I can't even wrap my mind around the concept.

theenabler52 01:31:00 AM Jan 19 2008

( cobdrum 11:31:18 AM Jan 18 2008 It is great that we explore space.Man will go to the stars one of these days.Did you know that "Wars" create inventions that help mankind.Jets,Atomic,Computers,to name a few.We as humankind are evil etc.and hopefully one of these days when we meet out own kind somewhere in space we have found a way to get along with one another. ) < GOOD and EVIL are RELATIVE, you cannot have one without the other in a SYSTEM OF VALUES. The real THREAT in SPACE is that we meet a more advanced PRAGMATIC species that does not have a VALUE SYSTEM, WNEN / IF that happens we would be in BIG TROUBLE.

rumours277 02:05:28 PM Jan 18 2008

Seeing all those pictures, how could anyone think that we are the only living beings out there?? We have no idea what's out there.....billions and billions and billions of light years and galaxies.......that we've only barely just scratched the surface of investigating........the human brain can't even begin to wrap itself around what could be out there. Somewhere. Places we can't even reach. How can we be certain there are no other living creatures anywhere out there. Maybe even another world just like ours, with beings just like us.
Incredible!!

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