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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."
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
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
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.
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.
Dubya's new space initiative to look for extraterrestrial oil hasn't filtered through to the mission planners yet...
(Just proof that any dumb @$$ can get elected in America...ooooh, pretty shiney!)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
since oil is organic matter more or less fossilized, in facts it would be interresting to look for extraterrestrial oil :D
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Ummm...my point exactly, hence the dumb @$$ comment about the current man-in-charge in D.C. I doubt he has enough science background to understand such things. Not that putting an engineer in the White House would result in a utopia - we tried that in the late 70s...nice guys make poor presidents.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
who are you refering to (the engineer @ whitehouse in the 70s) ?
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.
Jimmy Carter. Smart fellow, nice guy. Will never make the top 10 list of American Presidents.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Carter was a nuclear engineer trained at the Naval Academy. Hi just played a peanut farmer on TV and in retirement.
It's no wonder that most of the big military tech that Reagan claimed credit for was actually initiated during Carter's time, nor that we had the most progressive alternative energy programs during that time. That was his field.
But yeah -- nice guys make poor presidents in this country. We really don't respect honesty, and that makes someone like Carter pretty ineffective in the political arena here at home. You've got to play the game that you're actually in, not the game you wish you were in.
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)?
Professors tend to be smart, connected and have, out of necessity, developed some political survival skills without being total politicos.
The owls are not what they seem
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"
Tell you what Chuckles, when it comes time to colonize Mercury, we'll send you first to see if it's worth the bother and what the hazards are. ("Whoops, no oxygen. Okay, noted. Send the next one.")
should be shelved until the problems on Earth are dealt with
If we wait for that, we'll never learn anything about our universe except how imperfect humans are.
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
The problems on Earth aren't going anywhere either. I'm a firm believer that spending more money on Space Exploration will eventually help solve earth problems, or give us an escape plan.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
This is another example of a space exploration project that should be shelved until the problems on Earth are dealt with.
....and the problems with earth are solvable entirely by engineers? Ah yes, nothing to do with cheap oil. or an industry dedicated to finding more of it. or your general suv loving suburbanites.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
(Just proof that any dumb @$$ can get elected in America...ooooh, pretty shiney!)
Yup. And Clinton got elected twice!
I'm really surprised at the Slashdot crowd. Understandably some are upset at the decision to stop funding Hubble. Others are upset that Bush wants a moon shot before a Mars shot. Still others are quite upset about the lack of tech jobs. But I figured that any president that was for NASA spending would be supported here. Sure, Bush isn't the greatest president - he should have gotten out of NAFTA and tried to reverse the trend for the one-world economy to help save American jobs. But Clinton was the one that signed on to NAFTA.
Complaining about gas prices? No one wanted Bush to drill for oil in the Alaskan refuge. I don't know that we would have been self-sufficient for oil (mostly because we have few refineries and we don't know how much oil is there). However, we're now owned by OPEC. Not to mention the environmentalists that force us to have many different varieties of gasoline manufactured and imported to meet the environmental laws. We did it to ourselves, folks. Bush was smart to shy away from the Kyoto treaty. Environmental devices to reduce air pollution are expensive - so companies are either going to pass the cost along to you or look for cheaper labor that, again, may affect you. Capitalism should drive a market - good old supply and demand. Unions drive up the cost of labor which sometimes drives those industries out of the country. (Look at the coal and steel industries that are all but defunct now. They were thriving up until the '80s and '90s, respectively.)
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?
How can anyone is the USA complain about gas prices? It's practically free compared to UK prices.
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.
Hoover is the only OTHER president besides Bush to have a net job loss during his presidency. Think you're right about the engineers.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
But I figured that any president that was for NASA spending would be supported here.
I hypothesize that the knee-jerk anti-Bush vitriol found on this site is produced largely by college students who haven't grown up enough to realize that being blindly against one party/candidate just leaves them open to abuse by the other party/candidate. They've also had so much anti-Bush rhetoric forced on them on campus that they haven't stopped to think that there are other valid positions.
Just my theory, though. I have lots of grown friends who can't seem to realize that not every single thing Bush does is bad or stupid.
...all the Earth's problems have been solved.
Yup, can't chew gum and walk at the same time either.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Friend. Many times I find myself tempted by the same sentiments. Especially given how the fortunes of ordinary citizens like myself have declined with the recent political, economic and military tides, both domestically and globally. But as I reflect on the matter I realize that from the time we left the place now known as Olduvai Gorge, we've been constantly restless things. Human beings must SEE. Human beings must KNOW. These traits are no more to be denied than the other basics of our nature.
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.