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Messenger Flies by Mercury
Riding with Robots writes "Today, more than three decades after the last spacecraft visited Mercury, Messenger buzzed just 200 kilometers above the planet's surface. During the encounter, the robotic spacecraft conducted a range of scientific observations, including imaging swaths of Mercury's surface that have never been seen up close before. A few of the first pictures are now available, with many more to come in the next few days."
Hats off to the folks who put this together. I was in high school the last time we saw any closeup pictures of Mercury. Every time we send probes to other panets we find out really cool stuff. Messenger should be no exception.
If we can't go there ourselves, we can send robots. Robots are cool. :-)
...laura
>A few of the first pictures are now available, with many more to come in the next few days.
Actually, only a few approach images are available. The first images from the close approach will not be available until 01/05/08 when Messenger has finished data collection and points its antenna towards Earth and begins to transmit data. Can't wait for images of a very harsh environment.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The first images from the close approach will not be available until 01/05/08
That should be 01/15/08. After 15:00 EST.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Those are just the approach images, the shots taken up through yesterday that show what the probe saw as it was speeding toward the planet. The close-ups taken today will be downloaded and posted over the coming hours and days. http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
Well, it'll go into orbit eventually, so yes. Hopefully.
And even without getting a lot closer, this is *huge*. Fully 55% of Mercury's surface has never been imaged by spacecraft (and cannot really be imaged well from the ground), so we don't have a very good idea what more than half the planet looks like. This flyby, I'm told, well see about half of the un-imaged area.
There's a really nice animation on the Flyby 1 page: 10Mb version, 84Mb version.
I'm an infovore...
Or... a Predator! *ducks*
That can't be real! There aren't any stars in the background!
Technoli
The Planet?
They just took a few shots of the moon if you ask me.
You must have read this highly informative site and applied your intensive research efforts directly to the debunking of this obviously fake planetary fly-by. My hat is off to you; job well done buddy...
Dang it all, even I can't keep from laughing at that page.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Perhaps you took the astrology course by mistake?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Section of Reworked Venera-13 Image http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm Checkout the venus pics if you havent already from the link above. Mercury surface pics would be cool.
You can't exactly put a base on the "unlit side", though. All sides get sunlight at some point. It's like saying that the humans have built Washington DC on the night-side of Earth: possibly technically true when said, but not very descriptive since that changes.
That's no moon...
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
I for one welcome our Predator ducks overlords.
Sorry.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Nothing beats those astrology and cosmetology courses.
That would be one hot ass!
Just as in Biology, a lot of what is observed in Astronomy is what's big, pretty, and easy. Venus and Mercury are two planets that are largely unappealing by normal standards - way too hot, completely dead and barren. It's always good to see good science being done for the sake of science, not public opinion. Cassini and the rovers were fantastic, but the less glamorous missions are just as important to our understanding.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
stare for a tenth of a second at the Sun through 8x binoculars. then you will have some idea why a camera that can image mercury's sunlit surface can't detect stars.
It's just taking them a bit longer than usual to 'shop out all the UFO's.
Something like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Duckula
There's a planet with a serious global warming problem.
Part of the problem, too, is that it's really tricky to get to Mercury due to the amount of delta-v you need to shed Earth orbit, plus unlike Mars, Mercury has a negligible atmosphere which makes aerobraking useless. That's why they did three slingshot maneuvers to get there. The navigation team at JPL has really outdone themselves with this flight, and are to be commended.
It actually takes more delta-v to get to the sun than it takes to leave the solar system from here. This is why that whole "send dangerous waste to the sun" is a really bad idea. It takes a huge amount of fuel and if you miss, you've got a dangerous payload in a highly eccentric orbit that almost certainly crosses the Earth's. What could possibly go wrong? :-)
And maybe it's because I'm a space nerd, but I think MESSENGER is glamorous as hell.
Perhaps you could clarify something for me. After you break earth's orbit, why would it take any extra energy to get to the sun? (This is assuming of course that the garbage is pointed at the sun and timed so it wouldn't get close enough to Venus and Mercury to divert it's course. Why would getting away from the sun be easier than going towards it?
And a solution to send garbage safely would be to aim it a bit high or low (perpendicular to orbit of Earth). The slingshot would almost never send it back towards the orbit. As a space geek I'm just curious.
Interestingly enough, the navigation of this flight was outsourced to Kintex. The mission itself is managed by APL... AFAIK, JPL wasn't particularly involved.
This is assuming of course that the garbage is pointed at the sun and timed so it wouldn't get close enough to Venus and Mercury to divert it's course. Why would getting away from the sun be easier than going towards it?
If you point it right at the Sun from ground perspective, it will just come back to circle the Earth unless propelled really hard. One needs to find a way to bleed sun-orbiting speed off of it. There's no free lunch.
Table-ized A.I.
With regards to you second question, unless the highly inclined orbit was altered again at perigee and apogee with respect to the sun, your payload would return to the Earth's orbit.
Note: I am not a rocket scientist, at least not for a while, but I have done a bit of interplanetary stuff like this. All the numbers come from google. And it is entirely possible I'm quite mistaken, but I hope this was a bit helpful.
Marvin knew: "Think of a number, any number..."
Solar sails do not use the solar wind (i.e. charged particles) for propulsion, but the light pressure (photons). Also, you can actually control the direction of the thrust gained from from the solar sail by changing the direction in which the photons are reflected (at the expense of absolute thrust, since the effective area of the sail drops if it does not reflect the photons straight back at the sun).
The answer is easiest to see in terms of angular momentum. (Orbits are really all about angular momentum, more so than energy.) If you break free of Earth's immediate gravity, you're still in pretty much the same orbit as the Earth going around the Sun. You have to dump a lot of that angular momentum to reach Mercury or the Sun, and that takes quite a bit of work. Remember, escape speed from the Earth's surface is around 11 km/sec, but the Earth's orbital speed is around 30 km/sec. You have to dump about 7 km/sec to go into a sufficiently elliptical orbit to reach Mercury and then you need to dump another 20-something km/sec to circularize the orbit. You have to dump almost all your orbital velocity it to reach the Sun at all (even on an elliptical orbit that reaches the Earth, I figure you need to drop down to 3 km/sec at Earth's orbit to reach the surface of the Sun). On the other hand, escaping completely from a circular orbit requires less than 45% more speed, so escaping the solar system completely requires less delta-v than going to Mercury. (It takes about 15 km/sec to reach Pluto's orbit, making yours ultimately circular.)
...quite a complex orbit, with mercurial days...
Yeah, but the emo nights are the worst. Planets can be so bipolar!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
200km! Wow, that's incredibly close to Mercury. For comparison's sake, geosynchronous orbit (where all our TV and most communication satellites live) are at 36,371 km from earth, 181 times as far as this probe went to mercury. Even the highest resolution earth imaging satellites we have orbit at around 500km.
While you can't scoop up the dirt, being that close for visuals has to be nearly as good as landing there...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.