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Messenger Discovers "Spider" Crater on Mercury
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property brings us a Washington Post story which discusses how scientists are finding surprises among the pictures sent back from Mercury by the Messenger spacecraft. In particular, images depicting a crater with over 100 troughs radiating out from it are stumping researchers. The crater is referred to as 'The Spider', and it occupies a basin that has turned out to be larger than once thought. NASA also has a discussion of the crater. The Messenger craft began taking the up-close photos earlier this month. From the Post:
"Scientists were also surprised by evidence of ancient volcanoes on many parts of the planet's surface and how different it looks compared with the moon, which is about the same size. Unlike the moon, Mercury has huge cliffs, as well as formations snaking hundreds of miles that indicate patterns of fault activity from Mercury's earliest days, more than 4 billion years ago."
Its a cosmic water balloon strike.
A comet impacted and splatted its matter all over.
liqbase
Is it the Great Stone Ass of Mars? http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSounds/3ACV10/09.mp3
Clearly, those are water channels running into the crater.
Obviously at some point Mercury was hollow and covered by an ocean, then an asteroid hits, punctures the surface, and the ocean drains into the center of the planet, creating the channels we see today.
Now, I know there are those who will say "but liquid water cant exist that close to the sun".
Well, to those people I say "Its not called Mercury for nothing".
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
When I think about how far we have come, I am truly amazed. These pictures are from a flyby too! Imagine what we will get when this thing sits in orbit!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I thought the faults and crustal weirdness on Mercury was from the Sun's insane gravity warping and distorting the planet as it rotates and revolves around the sun (also - the super-hot temperature causes expansion on the hot side, compression on the cool side).
stuff |
Why is it so surprising that Mercury is much different volcanically than the moon? Mercury is substantially closer to the sun (duh), and is in a funky spin resonance/tidal lock with it. Temperature also varies by several hundred degrees across its surface. It doesn't seem that shocking to me that it has different seismic and volcanic parameters than the moon.
Really, I think it's more like 6500 BC.
Who is this guy and why does he have three stories on the front page? Roland reincarnated?
So I guess David Bowie was wrong, the spiders are on Mercury not Mars.
Looks like a simple splat to me. Shards of molten rock thrown out from site of impact.
Why are the researchers so stumped?
More like sperm.
Quid Pro Quo, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't know how "Mercury" translated to "Mars" in my head, but that is why my previous comment makes pretty much no sense whatsoever.
I think the difference is due to their formation. Mercury I believe was formed naturally out of gas and elements like Earth, and so has volcanoes etc. While Moon is probably a breakaway part of earth, which got formed just before solidification of earth started. So that Moon never had a hot core, and so there was no volcanic activity.
"The spiders are on not on Mars. Get your ass over to Mercury!"
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Oh no it isn't!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking#Planets
"Until radar observations in 1965 proved otherwise, it was thought that Mercury was tidally locked with the Sun. Instead, it turned out that Mercury has a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, rotating three times for every two revolutions around the Sun; the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit makes this resonance stable. The original reason astronomers thought it was tidally locked was because whenever Mercury was best placed for observation, it was always at the same point in its 3:2 resonance, so showing the same face, which would be also the case if it were totally locked."
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
One year on mercury is 87.97 earth days. One sidereal day is 58.65 earth days. The apparent day if you were on the surface is actually 176 days or 2 mercurial years.
So the tidal tug for whatever its effect, is varying.
Don't feel bad. It's only recently that we learned this and in elementary school I learned the whole tidally locked story too.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Now I get to have nightmares about "Mercurian Crater Spiders". Thanks Slashdot.
Spiderplanet Spiderplanet does whatever a spiderplanet does...
It is a Shadow Ship. Hiding for thousands of years. Waiting for the year 2268
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just from what I can see,it looks as though perhaps Mercury isn't as solid underneath its crust as perhaps thought.It looks to me like it was hit causing compression,sunk,then pressure pushed back up causing the cracks which may or may not have guided lava.Mercury,a bad place to visit and I wouldn't wanna live there.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Don't try to escape by flying down the central hole, landing, and then getting out and walking about.
Trust me, it just isn't a good idea.
Am I the only one who got excited when I read "Messenger Discovers "Spider" Critter on Mercury"?
I, for one, welcome our Mercurian Spider Critter Overloads!
Big impact, super heated rock.
Big splash.
Flow back into depression.
Make dimple shape you see.
That's no spider ... it's Cthulhu. I lose 2D4 SAN.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, it explains, Shadows are on Mercury, than on MARS - they probably figured, lazy humans will never find out their resting ships till the year 2268. Atleast we know B5 is all true - damn were are Vorlons when you need them...wait - I think they are on Venus. Yes, Venus it is it....
was anal fissure.
I'm blaming all the goatse trolls.
Pictures sent in Messenger appear sometimes like craters in my kopete, too. Very disturbing.
Its just that a several of MESSENGER scientists lack the imagination and experience of a geologist. Keep your mind open for possible volcanics in the past.
Well, in those days Mercury was a dreary uninhabitable wasteland much like Utah; but unlike Utah, Mars was eventually made livable. -Professor
It's not even funny how far I am from being qualified to make this guess, but I'll do it anyway....
Maybe a large asteroid of ice or large comet hit it on the night side and then melted when Mercury turned the crater to the day side, causing all the runoff to create the crazy channels radiating out from the crater?
Okay, commence ripping this theory to shreds. Ready? Go!
(just to be an anal retentive geek, photons often overlap/"touch" since they are bosons. Remember, these are wave/particles aka. "wavefucntions" so photons Definitely touch, electrons less so but they "touch" too. there's definitely piles of 'empty space' between the electrons and the nucleus, though.)
Just FYI, I'm not Roland (and he's still submitting stories, BTW). Those guys were out whoring their blogs. I don't have a blog to whore, so I link to things like the EFF's donate page or currently the "I wouldn't steal" page.
:-) Oh, and there are four stories at this moment. I think that's a personal best.
So you might say I'm submitting stories to raise awareness of a cause, not unlike NYCL. I don't make a dime from this like Roland & co. were trying to. Also, you may notice that the name is unregistered. Feel free to submit stories in my name. You could consider it a form of living what I believe, because I'm even willing to share my identity.
Basically, it's quite easy to get stories on Slashdot: just trawl the other tech news sites and try to make a semi-decent summary of what you just read, then think up a good headline (which is often _the_ most important part, you can see in this story that they dumped my summary entirely, but they kept the headline). Just pick only the stories that interest you the most. There are LOADS of crap stories that aren't very interesting, but if you submit 3-5 a day (less when there's no real news) you'll probably get at least one story on Slashdot per day.
If nothing else, it's a fun thing to do while slacking off at work
Looks like the work of Harmoniums feeding off the vibrations of the impact that created the crater. I guess there were no Chronosynclastically Infundibulated humans around to rearrange the harmoniums to spell 'This is no moon'. /Vonnegut Tribute
The shadow vessel got lost and will be heading to Mars soon, nothing to see here, move along.
If you review radar imagery of the Calderas of Venus, you find similar features to the "Spider" crater of Mercury. IMHO, the Spider is a collapsed Volcano. The interior expands with molten material which then vacates and permits a collapse of the volcanic structure, causing the radial channels. The largest channel appears to be due to a lava flow. Also uncharacteristic of an impact crater is the steepness of the walls and the height of the central peak, i.e. disproportionate to the size of the crater.
Hahaha, who tagged this 'sendinronwealsey'?
As you know, Mercury is an anomalously heavy planet for such a small object. One widely accepted theory is that sometime in the distant past, Mercury was much bigger and suffered from a collision that ripped away most of Mercury (the abundance of craters means that it must have happened a very long time ago). Recently, we have discovered planetary systems orbiting around other stars. One thing that a lot of these systems feature is a large Jupiter-like gas planet orbiting close to the star. In fact, our solar system is beginning to look anomalous in not having a masive gas-giant close to the sun. I have a theory that Mercury was once a gas-giant that suffered a high-speed collision with a large object. The force of the collision was such that the entire atmosphere of Mercury was ejected into space. The 'spider' in the picture looks like it could have been a meterorite impact that punctured Mercury's crust, but somehow, I doubt it was created by an impact with enough force to rip away a gas-giant-sized atmosphere.
Mercury looks more and more like crematoria [from ridick] if it had that same kind of reactive surface as crematoria. It once may have had that kind of effect and has simply just exhausted its surface of reactive material. This would explain some of the surface scaring and channels.
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Since spiders have only eight legs, wouldn't "Spider Web" be more appropos?
Further, the appearance suggests the fracturing of a hard surface. Is the surface glassine in nature?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
i keep thinking about Vernor Vinge's Book because of this thread.
Robert A. Heinlein is ROFL'ing in his grave!
-- thinkyhead software and media
It looks more like a sea urchin to me.
Looks more like "the pre-streching goatse crater"...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.