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Messenger Spacecraft Prepared for Mercury
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's first orbiter to the planet Mercury is shown today in cut-away, revealing the parasol design that will protect it from intense heat. Twenty layers of aluminized Kapton will be its sunshade. Curiously since the innermost planet is so close to the Sun, the Mercury mission itself will look for (cometary) water-ice preserved on the less baked north pole."
"My future's so bright, I've got to wear shades."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Finally, a spacecraft where using an RTG wouldn't be a huge benefit. Knew it was going to happen someday, right?
The outside of this 6-foot solar umbrella will rise to 680F (360C), while its special insulating properties will keep its inside surface below 212F (100C) - and the spacecraft operating at room temperature.
How can you keep the spacecraft at room temperature if everything around it is at least 212F? I need to get some of those fans for my computer.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
Perhaps Oakley or Cinzano or someone could boost NASA funding for some minor logo placement.
At first glance, I thought they were using an ion drive, or something - classic design for such a thing is to have a giant "sail" at the back, powered by the "wind" generated by an ion drive... slow at first, then gets very fast.
Being the closest planet to the Sun you would expect Mercury to be the hottest but this is not true. Mercurys maximum temperature falls 50C short of that of Venus. The reason for this is that Mercury has very little atmosphere so there is no 'greenhouse' effect on the environment. The 430C daytime temperature is dictated purely by the Suns radiation. The Mercurian day is 176 terrestrial days long, the night is 88 terrestrial days long with a minimum temperature of -180C.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
The ultimate goal for all space science is to give us the means to colonize other planets.
But this mission has nothing to do with WMD or oil. It's SCOs mission to check if mercury doesn't run linux without paying.
isn't there anything better to look for water on the various planets?
looks like NASA don't have any goals.
Sure there are lotsa other places to look too but this is a tidally-locked object not far from where many inner-system comets end up, ie the Sun. It'd be curiouser if Mercury hadn't intercepted a few comets over the eons and there weren't some traces of those collisions left on the benign parts of the planet.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Then in the case of Mercury, I guess it really is the heat, not the humidity that gets to you :P
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
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This image beautifully illustrates the multilayered approach the team devised to fend off the excess heat while the spacecraft is near Mercury
Are we looking a the same picture?
This is not an informative image.
It could just as well be Fruit Fucker Prime with a tarp over it.
Impressive technology. Abysmal photography.
What to do with this? It was worked out a decade ago. See:
u blications/Mercury_Ice.html
u blications/210Ways.html
HUMAN AND ROBOTIC PRECURSOR MISSIONS TO THE POLAR ICECAPS OF MERCURY
http://www.magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures/Spacep
and related papers in:
http://www.magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures/SpaceP
They should send a rover on over.
Mercury must have some interesting elements collected from solar winds.
A good landing site would be on the dark side obviously to avoid overheating.
However, if I remember correctly, Mercury also sports the coldest temps in the solar system due to its rapid evaporation.
Kind of like the cooling effect one gets when a wind blows on wet skin.
But I somehow doubt those rumors with it being so close to the sun.
So how about playing on the transitional areas of light and dark areas.
This planet was thought to be like our moon in that the same face points towards the Sun, leaving a perpetual dark and light side. However, it was shown to have a strange rotation of three rotations every two of its years.
What I would like to see from a rover is a video showing the sunsets and sunrises.
Its suppose to be really bizarre.
The sun rises and picks up speed as it grows in size! Then it pauses at the top and reverses the process.
If they did find ice water on the planet, do you think huddling some poor humans in a crater there would be beneficial or sacrificial?
Just some musings.
Am I the only one that read it as:
Twenty lawyers of aluminized Kapton will be its sunshade.
Kapton is a polyamide film duPont product that's been around for some 30 years . . .
I wonder if its the same metalized film used in some automobile window heat shields (or might that be metalized biaxially oriented nylon film)?
This is another example of a space exploration project that should be shelved until the problems on Earth are dealt with.
A mission to Mercury can wait two or three hundred years. Mercury isn't going anywhere and there isn't anything that we could learn from the massive expenditure for such a project that will be of any direct and servicable use to us for another 200 years.
For NASA to request funds for projects like this only confirms the growing public perception that the entire space program is nothing more than a big welfare handout for scientists and engineers who forgot to study anything useful in grad school.
Naming a probe to Mercury Messenger is fitting because Mercury was a god of messengers. Of course, that wasn't his only devine attribute, so I expect the next probe to be called Thief, Traveller, or Merchant.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Close.... APL (who built messenger) actually uses an SCO product.
I use Bill as a desktop but when I need to do any real work I log on to one of our many Linux systems and guess what...."Vision" (I think thats it's name) or something like that is what we use for X windows software and it's an SCO product.
So what I'm saying is simple.
When I need to do a detailed simulation on a Red Hat Linux system the results are presented to me through an SCO product on a Windows system.
What a world... What a world.....
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
So you're trying to *not* get baked? Dude...!
Well, sounds as if you've chosen to participate in an ignoble, dead-end existence. A white-trash Buddhist fatalism envelopes you.
As it is Easter Sunday, you may ponder what the carpenter said a couple thousand years back and discover peace in truth.
Or, you may crawl into a bottle.
Hopefully, the former.
Ok, so we send Mercury Messenger, but will it use it? I've heard Mercury is a unix geek and prefers IRC.
today is spelling optional day.
Merchant has got to be for Venus (Merchant of Venus, 5 players, no worms, anyone?)
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Because I made a typo and put 30,000,000 m/s instead of 300,000,000 m/s I'm a troll?
Sheesh.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
There will NEVER be a day when there is a utopian heaven on Earth. There will always be corruption, war, famine, greed and every other problem that is born from human failings. Earth's persistant failure to become a paradise is not a valid reason to postpone space exploration. And in 200 years, your great-great-great-great grandchildren will be saying "There is no reason to explore the Oort clouds until all problems on Earth have been solved....." With that attitude, we needn't have even bothered climbing out of the ocean. "There is no use exploring the land until there is enough plankton for everybody...." And it isn't as though vast amounts of money are being spent on space exploration. We spend a hell of a lot more on porkbarrel projects and foreign misadventures that won't have any sort of meaningful return at all. At least we get some knowledge and wonderment out of the deal.
Aren't they just getting too obsessed with finding ice and water? how about looking for something else?
Nice to see Mercury getting some action these days.
A rover is an interesting idea, but it's pretty complicated to actually achive. Mercury is not rorationally locked to the Sun, so if you land something on the shade side, it'll rotate into sunlight within a month, or so.
The big difference between Mars and Mercury when it comes to rovers would be that a rover on Mars is facing towards Earth every 24 hours, or so. (One Mars day is just a little over 24 hours). But, the Mercury orbit and rotation period means that the rover would only directly be able to point at Earth for a period of a week, or two, every few months. It would require retransmission from an orbitor to extend the mission beyond the initial viewing time. That is quite possible, of course. They do it with Mars all the time. It's just more significant with Mercury because of the lack of direct line communication for most of the time on the surface.
Is just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Or maybe you just haven't had enough to drink yet.
...all the Earth's problems have been solved.
Yup, can't chew gum and walk at the same time either.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
They should just go at night.
Or M$'s "secure" version of Winblowz.
you may ponder what the carpenter said a couple thousand years back
"I'm so frigging tire of sawing logs. I wonder if I could run one of those prophet scams without the Romans catching on?"
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
April Physics Today reports the Bush administration cut Messenger from the budget. This in order to concentrate on remaining missions like the Kuiper Pluto mission, Kepler planetary dectection, New Technology Space Telescope, and a few others. This is an advisory to Congress, which occasionally restores programs over administration objections.