Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!