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Messenger Probe Sends Back Mercury Photos
arbitraryaardvark writes "NASA's Messenger probe flew past Mercury at a distance of 125 miles. The spacecraft took hundreds of pictures during the pass, updating photos from the now 30-year-old Mariner mission. According to an article at the International Business Times, the probe will eventually settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011. 'The images obtained by the $446 million MESSENGER mission (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) this week contain some of those unexplored areas. One image released Saturday was taken after Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury last week. In the photos released this week, scientists have observed unexplored cratered areas of the planet. On Monday, Messenger made its closest approach to Mercury yet, aiming for new discoveries. Among its goals is to discover if Mercury has ice water in its polar craters and to complete the mapping of the whole planet.' Meanwhile here on Earth, a joint EU/Japan probe with an ion drive is set to head towards Mercury sometime in 2013."
Leave it to the engineers at NASA: It's not enough that the probe is going to send messages back from an alien world. It's not enough that the world in question is Mercury, who was the messenger of the Roman gods. No. They have to make it an acronym.
Breakfast served all day!
125 Miles?? Have they not learnt their lesson over at Mars?
Its the 21st century damnit, and these guys are still in the 19th.
Why does it look like the moon?
why is it in black & white?
submitted story was just:
NASA's Messenger probe flew by Mercury 125 miles away and took pictures, updating 30 year old pioneer 10 photos. Messenger will orbit Mercury in 2011. The ion drive European/Japanese ship doesn't launch till 2013. Wired Bad Astronomer. (y'know, with some some links in there.)
I thought for a moment I was looking at detroit around this time of year.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Ba-dum, ching.
Seriously, it's intriguing - personally, I'd rather see the energy and capital investment spent on something with a slightly more tangible payoff like the exploration/colonization of Luna/Mars/etc. . . but if closer analysis of Mercury lets astrophysicists devise more accurate models of planetary formation, I suppose there's a value there too.
So, NASA . . . are we there yet?
(Ba-dum, ching)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/phone_crater.html
NASA says that crater looks like it has a phone shape in it. The first thing I thought was "Damnit, someone put a copyright on Mercury."
-Vendal Thornheart
LAME
First time I heard about sending a probe to mercury.. I would have thought that would be the least interesting of the planets round these parts. With operations as expensive as these, wouldn't they want to focus their resources on Mars or something?
Real engineers wouldn't care if it was called project 11-A-004. Likely the name came for manager/spin-people spending hours and hours in meetings and focus groups, costing tax payers about $5.7 million.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But really, I'm disappointed. How many millions of dollars and how much waiting just to see more photos of a vaguely spherical object with lots of cratering. This is not the 90s folks. They really need to make flashier pictures if they want to get the public interest.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
... using older mappings.
I wonder what would happen if the universe was hawkish enough and no matter how we look at it, life here is temporary.
Makes me think...
"If you can't take an interest in local affairs, you are a pathetic bloody planet. I have no sympathy for you at all" or something like that... the hitchhikers guide.
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I had a friend try and tell me that this, and the rest of our space explorations, is a total waste of money.
Personally I'd rather keep throwing things at other planets to learn about them (like MESSENGER, Spirt & Opportunity (Mars Rovers), or New Horizons (First mission to Pluto, launched prior to being "deplanetized"), as opposed to dumping the same funds into our war campaign in the Middle East.
This kind of stuff is a lot more... lasting even though its less tangible.
Hopkins and Carnegie are doing something people care about? The government better take back that grant money ASAP!
Am I the only one annoyed about the space news always being something like "xxx mil./bil. $ space stuff was lunched or did something"? I do not recall this kind of obsessive, "not once missed" remark on other type of news. With news like this there is no wonder that people make mistakes.
The war campaign in the Middle East has nothing to do with this (save that it's wasting perfectly good money which could be used to fund both lines of scientific inquiry about two thousand times over. That's not hyperbole - look up the numbers and crunch 'em - I'll wait).
200km, wow! As a point of reference, geosyncrhonous satellites on earth are 36,371 km high, and the best resolution earth imagery satellites are at around 500km.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Where's the damn color? I don't understand why after all these decades, it's so hard for them to take color photos. Just slap a damn Sony camcorder on there if you have to, and take some regular color pictures, to show what our own eyes would perceive if we were there.
The surface is nearly colorless (gray), like the moon. So images in all wavelengths they look about the same. Particulate surfaces that are highly gardened by meterite strikes tend to be like that. Perhaps thermal IR or X ray florescence would show more variation.
an ill wind that blows no good
Where's the damn color? I don't understand why after all these decades, it's so hard for them to take color photos.
They probably didn't have time to take many images of the same spots through multiple filters. However, when the probe eventually settles into orbit in the coming years, they will be able to start such an endeavor.
Different filters are primarily to study chemical composition, but can also be used to make nifty color images (like this moon one).
In short, be patient. This mission has only just begun...
Table-ized A.I.
"the public affairs officials think you are too stupid to understand kilometers"
Unless you are...
- raised on the metric system
- currently in school and dealing with metrics
- are or were in the army (klicks ftw)
- are in a scientific field primarily using the metric system
chances are that yes, you are indeed too stupid to understand kilometers.
Now don't get me wrong - not saying you're too stupid to calculate how many miles a given kilometers figure would be... but just because you can do the math doesn't mean you grasp the concept.
If somebody tells me something is 350 miles away then I, for one, wouldn't have the foggiest how far that would be right that very instant. I have to calculate.. (350*1.5 is 525, add another 10%, 525+35...) 560. Okay, I know how far that is. Now that calculation takes place pretty fast, but it still needed to be done.
If somebody tells me something is 350 kilometers away, I know immediately how far that is*
So it's not that people are truly too stupid to be able to say how many miles a given kilometer figure is - it's just 'instantly' recognizable for people if it's in the unit they're used to
* to a limit, of course. I don't know how far 7800 kilometers is - I don't have any frame of reference for figures that large. Similarly, 45nanometer processes are lost on me in terms of scale.. I just know it's really, really, really f'ing small, and about 2/3rds the size of a 65nm process.
Well, they did have a little help hitching a ride on the NASA/JPL Cassini spacecraft and the Lockmart Titan IV Centaur. With all that they screwed up development of Huygen's radio transmitter ignoring the doppler effect between Cassini and the probe. This was fixed by NASA by redesigning the Huygen's landing. ESA still screwed up the entry losing half of the returned data. If you aren't impressed by the US program one wonders whose you are impressed with? China? NASA has an absolute armada of spacecraft throughout the solar system. No other nation comes close.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'm afraid the SETI people will be quite disappointed when the first extraterrestrial communication they receive is from a copyright lawyer.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/phone_crater.html
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
A similar hyper-color image of the Moon (that makes a nice desktop/background): http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060907.html
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
I should note that the link I gave did not use color filters, but rather regular color photography, and stacked up several dozens in order to tease the color out. One advantage of filters is that you can capture more colors and wavelength range than the human eye can see. (Theoretically color film like that could be made, but it would be useless for consumer use, unless you are a bird or a fish.)
Table-ized A.I.
I'm assuming those strange lights are geysers of some kind lit up by the sun???
This place is getting worse than Digg.
I noticed the video they made was made from about 4 images. In black and white. And the rest of the photos are in black and white as well. Is NASA still clinging on to the 60s? Why was the earth video so smooth, taken from the same probe? Why were the earth images in color? Why must all other planets out there be black and white? Normal, modern cameras can't even take black and white photos without a post processing filter these days - and I know NASA isn't using normal cameras, but still, Mercury isn't completely greyscale. It would be nice to see the different shades of color even if they were so called "false color" (NASA really is a color blind organization :-))
In my opinion showing all these photos in b/w puts the space mission presentation in a worse light than it would otherwise. I really don't understand why it is so difficult to snap some high resolution color pictures for us to view. Can anyone enlighten me? And don't give me the loaddown that science cameras are color blind and that the infrared is more important, as I really can't accept that it would be so hard to reproduce Mercury in colors in 2008.
If you carefully study all the awesome pictures, one may realize that this must be the most boring planet. Ever.
Mariner 10 three flybys within two years of its 1973 launch. MESSENGER will take almost seven years. However it will have slowed down enough for orbital capture.
The great thing about NASA is they now release raw photos on the web within days. The ESA only releases occasional publicity photos from its Mars and Venus orbitors. They have a one-year embargo so the scientists can publish results first. That was NASA's policy too a long time ago. ESA might be doing interesting stuff, but nobody's going to hear about it.
Raw photos arent the best for scientific study. They have to have shape and lighting/color distortion corrected, and composited into larger photos or animations. NASA releases corrected photos a few months later.
Theoretically color film like that could be made, but it would be useless for consumer use
Actually, it is made. The two approaches are for it to be greyscale and only represent e.g. UV or IR, or to shift the colour channels (for example, UV = blue, Blue = green, Green = red, with actual red light not being represented in the photograph).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
They looked so much like low res versions of moon pictures taken by Japan, can see why they're still trying to drum up hits weeks after the flyby.
I meant film that simultaniously captures multiple colors, not frequency-specific film. If I was not clear on that, I apologize.
Table-ized A.I.
This list starts out slow but has some gems:
are almost always "black and white" and color is obtained by rotating different color filters in front for several shots. The different colored shots are combined to get color images.
"False color" is used (most often) when the images are taken in frequencies human eyes can't see, and so the data are adjusted bring out signif features.
The lack of smoothness, and use of few frames, is probly cuz this was a flyby, not final approach to orbit. Flybys occur at much higher speeds, and there's less time, so fewer frames.
Actually, the darkside of Mercury (yes, it has one. No, Earth's moon does not.) IS grayscale (like the inside of a black cat in a coal mine at midnight...). Infrared isn't more important, for science, what's most important is viewing with the widest range of frequencies possible.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I don't really consider a cosmically sized face-plant to be a sign of intelligence.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.