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Spacecraft Sends First Image From Mercury's Orbit
adeelarshad82 writes "NASA released an image of Mercury captured by its Messenger spacecraft — the first ever obtained from the planet's orbit. The first image came in at 5:20am Eastern yesterday, and over the next six hours, Messenger captured an additional 363 images, which are still being transmitted to the Messenger team on Earth. In the next three days, the spacecraft will capture another 1,185 images, with the goal of snapping 75,000 over the next year."
Thanks, I'm reading slashdot in class like a good student and just got tubgirl'd.
GOATSE of course.
I did not even bother to look, but this same idiot has been doing this for weeks now. Fuck off asshole.
Readers beware: it's actually a map of Uranus.
They called that the Moon. All kidding aside, it looks like a shot of good 'ol Luna to these untrained eyes.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Here are the actual photos: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/
No atmosphere, and less craters than the Moon. Lame.
Thank god you thought of the kids.. thank you sir for at least having the decency to make her genitals unrecognisable
So change the user agent of your browser. Same thing firefox users did for ages. Not sure if iPhone default browser supports that, but one of them must.
What I did on my android device.
That one is also a classic kiddo. Just discover trolling did we?
Go out, find new and more disgusting images young one. These old ones only make us feel nostalgic instead of revolted.
Reading this on an iPhone gives you an article about a photo, without the photo.
Look, kid, a phone is for talking, OK? What do you want to see pictures on a phone for?
Seriously.
Here is the link to the NASA press release.
And here is the link to the image.
Aliens.
Aliens.
Alien warp engines.
Alien space station.
Alien ice.
Aliens farting.
Pnårp's docile & perfunctory page!
What's the local time on Mercury for that?
Do you have ESP?
MOUNT JANIS JOPLIN!
Ew. No. I refuse. Would never hit that, ever. Especially not nowadays, with her being dead and all.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
It took Science out for dinner and a movie, maybe some small talk. I don't think the Manned Space Program wants to get too emotionally committed to Science with all the two-timing that Science is doing.
So change the user agent of your browser. Same thing firefox users did for ages. Not sure if iPhone default browser supports that, but one of them must.
What I did on my android device.
Thanks i didnt know it had the option.
Mobile sites suck (unless consisting mainly of a menu or dropdownboxes.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Machines are getting better, we aren't.
Just listen to this podcast. Very instructive. Voyager and the Third Age of Discovery
I was not sure it did, but it must be available somehow. Seems like a pretty basic feature to me.
Go out, find new and more disgusting images
Here you go.
While there may not be a lot of exploration and discovery, it doesn't mean that there isn't any science being done.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/List.html
Maybe they need flashier experiments?
At least it wasn't lemon party.
You need to grow up kid.
I suppose if your poop explosively grows in volume in micro-gravity, you probably have bigger worries than trying to arbitrarily decide what is and isn't science.
actually, yes. That sort of information is important if we ever are going to send people interesting places. Sure, its far fetched, but pretend we figure out how to teraform a planet within the solar system. knowing how fast feces expands in volume in free fall becomes important if your moving several thousand people across interplanetary distances for colonization. It may seem pointless to YOU, but some of us hold hope that mankind's exploration of space did not stop at the moon.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
the vagina is pixelated. how modest of them.
you said it yourself "unless some new physics happens" well there you go, i can hope that we don't know all there is to know about the universe, and that someone finds some new quirk of reality, which leads to some new technology that allows us to explore beyond our planet. hope. Is HOPE so offensive? I'm not saying it WILL happen, i'm saying I HOPE it does. As for the science they do in space, sure, a lot of things humanity has learned may have seemed useless at the time (heck, learning that the earth is round, and what its radius is was not useful to anyone until a long time after it was learned) but it MAY become useful to us someday.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
knowing how fast feces expands in volume in free fall becomes important if your moving several thousand people across interplanetary distances for colonization
As far as "putting the cart before the horse" goes, this one takes the cake.
Don't worry, it looks like the moon!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Lame indeed. I just took a look at Messenger's supposed First Color Image of Mercury from Orbit. I thought I'd gone color blind. It looked so gray. Trying to reproduce the subtle shades in a color printer would be a terrible waste of ink or toner, as you'd be forced to go Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) to print out something not quite Black (K) or gray.
The mission may yet turn up some astounding scientific discovery, but Mercury isn't a very photogenic planet, as far as celestial bodies go.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Why did people ever bother to sail across the barren wasteland that is the ocean?
Living without dreams is not something I am interested in. It has nothing to do with hope; it is about discovery and magic.
To address your comments regarding lack of "real" technological advances over the last decades, you glazed over perhaps the most promising area of future progress: biotech. IT (which you admitted is improving quite readily) will make cracking the DNA code far more feasible. With the ability to rewrite life (and ourselves) from the ground up, meaningful space exploration could become quite attainable. Who says we will still need to breathe or eat; why not absorb solar power directly?
I am sorry that you can't go in your garage and grow a human with wings yet, but a native in the rainforest can't create a bicycle with sticks either. Why should he waste his time trying?
Lead, follow, or get out of the way, my friend.
to address all your 'points', I essentially have to post a paper demonstrating that I've found some new law of physics, which obviously, I cant. I'm just saying that some people still have that bizarre wanderlust to see what is over the next ridge, or past that next sea. Sure, its essentially useless to humanity at this stage, as the globe has basicly been explored for all practical purposes. Fine, its not "offensive" and yes there is plenty to "Hope" for right here on earth, Fine, thats all well and dandy, but I don't see a problem with some people trying to look beyond this marble into the vast unknown. and if its the money that gets spent on these 'junk science' projects that bothers you, then get bothered by the fact that americans spend more on cell phones in a year than they do on the entire space program. as for 'you cant program your way into orbit' sure you can, better simulations and models allow us to design better vehicles that are more efficient, or perhaps find better orbital insertion trajectories. 'you cant kevlar your way to the moon' You absolutely can. Better materials science can bring us lighter, stronger materials, or more effective radiation shields. Sure, humans are pathetic mal-adapted meatbags in space, but we're not meant to be on top of mount everest, or in a bathysphere in the bottom of the mariana trench either. The thing that attracts some of us to space is the fact that there is so damn much of it out there, so it seems a pity to not dream of seeing it. You may be dead set against the idea of *anyone* wanting to step of this planet to see what is out there in person, but that does not mean that no one can like the idea. have a nice day.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
$mount janis joplin
only root can do that
And hey, maybe we'll get to the point where we won't even have to physically leave the Earth's gravity well in order for us to explore space. Send the machines out first. Even if propulsion tech never advances beyond what we have today, who cares how long they take to reach their destinations?
But once they arrive, they point their receivers back to Earth.
Because, after all, what travels as fast as light? Well for one, there's light itself...
Send minds, not bodies.
Yeah, yeah, I'm a Space Nutter crossed with a Singularitarian, twice the loon. Well, either that or a Greg Egan fan. ;)
Why in the name of all things holy does this link to pcmag? For godsake just go to nasa.gov. It doesn't make too much of a difference on this topic, but it's getting really bad. Just look at the Fukushima stories. I know it sounds silly to complain so much, but people seriously need to learn the difference—and more importantly how to find—primary sources. Intentional or not, there's a huge amount of misinformation out there and there's just no reason every article on /. needs to be routed through a blog post or two before you give up and go looking for the source material on your own. /. is clearly not the place for me. Will paste unknown garbage into password field and block site shortly...
On the off chance that I did not just succumb to a troll, why are you so set against pursuing possibilities?
I never said it would happen. I said I am not interested in living with your mindset that it won't.
Lead those that seek complete understanding of the universe, follow those that have the strength to carry on, or get out of the way and live in your reality. We aren't worried about those that already know everything. I do not know if space does or does not hold a place for us, just as I am not going to fool myself into thinking that I know whether there is or there is not a god. If that makes me a moron then, well, let's just say we would be standing at opposite sides of the room at any party we might happen to both attend. I think your side will be having a lot more fun, certainly!
Life at sea is not a cake walk. If you think so, you obviously have never spent any non-trivial time on a boat. With the limited technology of the time, undertaking such journeys was "moronic". Sure space is worse, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The thrill of the hunt, the challenge. If you don't feel it, what can I say?
I am not sure how carved metal is much different than carved trees. Perhaps one day our descendants will look back and will be amazed that we could accomplish what we have without "Future Technology 42".
I am sorry that we could not accomplish whatever would satisfy your expectations within half a century. I guess incremental progress is worthless since you won't live to enjoy the full results?
We do have an entire universe on Earth to study and learn about. I think we should definitely focus less on actual immediate space travel and more on longterm education. But you might want to read the writing on the wall; the Earth just isn't big enough for the two (hundred billion) of us.
I am sorry I riled you up to the point of incoherence. Or maybe you can explain why you feel that nerds/geeks are scared to learn how a cell works? There are plenty of us that are interested in understanding life. The implicit grammars involved in DNA are damn well fascinating for a automata "Nutter" like myself.
In summary, stop being such a stick in the mud. Oh, and maybe you could control your slavering insults. Although, again, I should know better than to be attracted to the primary tool of the troll.
Hubble has never taken pictures of Mercury because the risk of pointing the telescope that near to the Sun is too great.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Never going to happen. Nice to have dreams, but you know it's not possible, right?
You can't program your way to Low Earth Orbit. You can't Kevlar your way to the Moon.
That's the difference between the early 20th century and now.
You troll.
The only thing changed since the advent of space travel is that we are no longer willing to take a great risk.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The type of rocket is very secondary, we know these are going to be long trips.
And yes, this would be a great step for mankind.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."