Lots of ink: Photos from Messenger, the new little artificial moon of Mercury
hi res http://tinyurl.com/4uj6fku
It’s about time. A whole, um, 13 days ago NASA engineers skillfully, and after a long and looping trajectory, got the science probe Messenger into orbit around the innermost planet Mercury. Now they’ve finally released some fresh photos of that slow-turning, half frosty and half baked planet. It appears there were housekeeping and other chores keeping the mission managers busy, because the release say the first photo was not taken until this week.
Personal note: That’s slower than the first close-up of photos of Mercury that old Mariner 10 radioed back almost the instant it made the first flyby of that planet way back on March 29, 1974 – just about precisely 37 years ago. That one crawled, in live broadcast, across the grainyvideo monitors in JPL’s press room raster line by line. Every 42 seconds, a new one showed, “the only delay being the eight minutes it took” for the signal to travel through space. The new photos are much better. I remember my lead like it was today: “The surface of Mercury revealed itself yesterday .. as an awesome jumble of craters upon craters, rent and torn by billions of years of meteor bombardment.” The same day brought first data on the planet’s magnetic field and atmospheric composition too. I remember the lede because I just pulled the story from a fraying manila envelope of my yellowed clips rescued years ago from discard at the SF Chronicle library back when it went digital. Those were the days.
Stories:
- AP – Seth Borenstein: First Mercury images in orbit show lots of craters ; Notes the large size of the craters and the secondary craters from their splashed debris. Cites a mission scientists explanation that, closer to the Sun and deeper in its gravity field than is our Moon, stuff smacks it harder. Not that everything is all about me, but that clip I mention above quotes the late great Bruce Murray explaining the first time around that meteors might typically hit Mercury at 150,000 mph, twice as fast as they’d hit the Moon. In just the first few days, Borenstein reports, the new, first-ever orbiter will have returned 15,000 more pictures.
- NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: In NASA’s Lens, Mercury Comes Into Focus ; This one has history, and makes clear why Messenger is a vastly more sophisticated probe, and in orbit yet, than was Mariner 10 in its few, fleeting fly bys. Or maybe those are flys by.
- LA Times – Amina Khan: NASA gets first close-up look at Mercury ;
- Wired News – Roy Wood: Messenger Probe Sends First Images From Mercury ;
- NPR (blog) Adam Frank: Why Mercury Matters ; Good, pithy job explaining how this “giant iron cannonball” of a planet fits into larger questions.
- MSNBC (Cosmic log blog) Alan Boyle: Probe sends marvels from Mercury ; Mostly photos, plus link to AP.
Could go on, but the “lots of ink” I put in the title for this blog was composed on seeing how many outlets picked up the news. I no doubt have missed some stories, but most are collections of the photos with small captions.
Grist for the Mill: NASA-Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Messenger site ;
- Charlie Petit
April 1st, 2011 at 4:06 pm
One intriguing peek behind the curtain on Kenneth Chang’s piece: the first version led this way:
“He’s really hot, really cold and maybe even a bit icy. He is the planet Mercury….”
The updated version read this way:
It’s really hot, really cold and maybe even a bit icy. It’s the planet Mercury….”
I’m glad someone thought the better of version #1
April 2nd, 2011 at 2:07 pm
These images are incredible. It is always interesting to see images of the planets in our solar system.
April 2nd, 2011 at 7:33 pm
Mike, why? At least on my first reading, I got the reference to Mercury (who’s male).
April 3rd, 2011 at 7:56 am
Getting it isn’t the same as thinking it’s a good lead. I though the original was a little too cute.
April 3rd, 2011 at 11:07 am
Cool pics, indeed. Good context in Ken Chang’s story.
Agreed, unless you go on about the Roman Gods, it seems best to leave gender out. Or someone might get carried away. “Sly, moody, and unpredictable, Venus is a tough girl.”
The change Mike saw might have been made in a hurry. First “It’s” then “it is.” Always hard to keep going in and futzing with stories. I don’t know if a proofreader sails by every so often to keep checking. sorry to be nitpicky, just noticed that.
April 5th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
I actually had only a little to do with the lead in any of the gender permutations. That’s a behind-the-curtain circumstance that Mike has probably experienced occasionally.
At one point, it was going to be “she.”
November 26th, 2011 at 5:57 am
Woow images like this is always fascinating for me. I read on nytimes that NASA send these days a ne rover on Mars. I hope we’ll get more pretty images of it.