* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: MESSENGER

Blobrana · L

A NASA spacecraft gliding over the surface of Mercury has revealed that the planet's atmosphere, the interaction of its surrounding magnetic field with the solar wind, and its geological past display greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected. The probe also discovered a previously unknown large impact basin about 430 miles in diameter -- equal to the distance between Washington and Boston.

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Blobrana · L

Huge impact crater discovered on Mercury
New observations from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft reveal about 30 percent of the planet Mercury that has never been seen up close before. A giant crater and evidence of ancient volcanoes are among the findings.

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Blobrana · L

MESSENGER reaches its orbital perihelion today and passes within 0.31 astronomical units (AU) of the Sun (one AU is nearly 150 million kilometres or 93 million miles). The mission's imaging team is taking advantage of the probe's proximity to the fiery sphere to continue their search for vulcanoids - small, rocky asteroids that have been postulated to circle the Sun in stable orbits inside the orbit of Mercury.
Vulcanoids are named after Vulcan, a planet once proposed to explain unusual motions in Mercury's orbit. Scientists have long suspected that these small, faint "space rocks" exist. There is a gravitationally stable region between the orbit of Mercury and the Sun, which means that any objects that originally formed there could have remained for billions of years and might still be there today.

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Blobrana · L

Deep-Space Manoeuvre Positions MESSENGER for Third Mercury Encounter
The Mercury-bound spacecraft MESSENGER completed the first part of a two-part deep-space manoeuvre today, providing the expected 90% of the velocity change needed to place the spacecraft on course to fly by Mercury for the third time in September 2009. A 4.5-minute firing of its bi-propellant engine increased the probes speed relative to the Sun by 219 meters per second to a speed of about 30.994 kilometres per second).
MESSENGER was 237.9 million kilometres from Earth when todays manoeuvre began at 3:30 p.m. EST. Mission controllers at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., verified the start of the manoeuvre about 13 minutes, 14 seconds later, when the first signals indicating spacecraft thruster activity reached NASAs Deep Space Network tracking station outside Goldstone, California

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Blobrana · L

Data from the second MESSENGER flyby of Mercury is coming in; NASA held a telephone press conference today to release some new, interesting stuff.
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Blobrana · L

Looking Back to the Source

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This NAC image shows a close-up view of the apparent source of those rays, a crater 110 kilometres in diameter located in the northern region of Mercury. The location of this bright crater is consistent with Earth-based radar images, which suggested a very fresh, rayed impact crater in this area.

Blobrana · L

NASA's Messenger probe returned images of new regions of Mercury on Tuesday, after a flyby that took the spacecraft within 200 kilometres of the planet's surface.

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Blobrana · L

And this is almost all new. Our previous maps of Mercury were amazing for their time, have no doubt, but we are a restless bunch, and love to fling ever-better technology at the places weve only seen fuzzily in the past. Now our vision is sharper but this is only a glimpse. MESSENGER will take a third swing at Mercury next year on September 29, and then, 18 months later, will settle down for a long stay, orbiting the planet and returning thousands of images such as these.
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Blobrana · L

MESSENGER Gathers Unprecedented Data about Mercurys Surface

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of Washington

MESSENGER Gathers Unprecedented Data about Mercurys Surface

This WAC image was acquired 9 minutes and 14 seconds after MESSENGERs closest approach to Mercury, when the spacecraft was moving at 6.1 kilometers/second (3.8 miles/second). The image, centered at about 2.4ºS, 290ºE, is one in a sequence of 55: a five-frame mosaic with each frame in the mosaic acquired in all 11 of the WAC filters.

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 20:18, 2008-10-07