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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!
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
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.
I imagine that many people thought the same about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, until Voyager started sending back pictures of Europa and Io. You never know where the next big insight is going to come from, and Mercury's had little enough attention for it to be worth a look. Mars is pretty substantially covered. That said, in the current funding climate (NASA's had to cancel projects left, right, and centre due to cuts to its thin post-Iraq budget), nobody would approve a mission to a rock like Mercury.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well, even NASA has problems with missions around this planet, during manned missions that should be held to a much higher standard.
(Not to mention problems with a mission that was just doing training on the ground)
But, the Mars Rovers, Apollo 11, and this mission are examples where NASA gets stuff very right.
(I hope I am not just putting gasoline and a lit fusee on the fire, like my dad is doing to that car there)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Its the 21st century damnit, and these guys are still in the 19th. They report it in miles. NASA has already converted over to metric. In fact they were converted over in the 90s (though obviously not all subcontractors were). The only reason you are hearing this in miles is because the public affairs officials think you are too stupid to understand kilometers.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Someone added it up and Mars currently has something like thirteen craft either on, orbiting or enroute to it.
Mercury got three flybys a couple decades a ago, and a hefty chunk of it has never even been seen. What makes Mars so much more interesting than Mercury, besides the fact that it's closer and we might be able to put some astronauts on it?
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.
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.
Also take a look at this image - the scattering of pixels in the top left part if the picture is not dust on your monitor but actual stars as seen by the spacecraft ! I wonder if it is possible to find out from this when the shot was taken and where the camera was pointing.
"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.
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 don' think those dots are stars. They probably wouldn't show up on a photos like this, especially seeing as Mercury is probably *very* bright because it's so much closer to the sun than us. I suspect there is actually a bit of processing going on the dim the photos to make sure they're not washed out.
I think it's either just noise from the camera, or possibly the effect of cosmic rays hitting the camera CCD. This is something that effects anything leaving Earth's protective atmosphere, and causes astronauts (especially Apollo astronauts) to see random flashes in their eyes as the cosmic rays hit the receptors at the back of the eyeball.
A bit of explanation here:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mir_lights_030416.html
I'm too cool for a sig.
From what this page says, these will be turned to color images later. They take the same picture at 10 different wavelengths then combine them to make a color image.
I think they went with B/W images to actually get better results with the camera.
No. The NASA doesn't use cameras with Bayer grids (pixel-sized red, green and blue filters) as we have in normal cameras because they care about much more than just visible colours so they have an unfiltered camera and they rotate before its lens a bunch of filters that includes red, green and blue filters but also infra-red and ultraviolet as well as polarized filters. The pictures we see are in B&W because as of now they didn't yet put together pictures taken with different filters in order to produce true or "false" colour images.
You just got troll'd!
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.
Well to be fair, most of their audience will be American.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife