First Probe To Orbit Mercury May Help Us Learn How Planets Form 88
An anonymous reader writes "Next month, the first space probe in nearly 40 years will approach the planet Mercury, with an array of instruments that could help answer fundamental questions about how planets form. The mission is called MESSENGER, for Mercury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging. On March 17 it will pull into orbit around mercury, after more than six years of maneuvering between the Earth, Venus and Mercury itself."
Badum Kisshhhhh. (Score:4, Funny)
On the bright side the solar panels don't have to be very large," Blewett said.
I see what you did there.
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Must be awful to be in the dark.
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Horribly written article (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Oh yes that as well. And he's writing about "this mystery material" without having introduced it beforehand... what mystery material I'd say. Oh and considering the temperature there can be so many other ice-like substances, like methane or carbon dioxide. That there is water in space is no surprise - no water out there would be more of a surprise. I always hear talk about meteors being clumps of rock and ice.
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Hmmm... Mercury. Shiny, liquid metal...
I see what you did there
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MESSENGER (Score:1)
They certainly did a lot of "ranging" coming up with that acronym.
New game-show? "NASA would like to buy a vowel for....ten million dollars!" *clap* *clap*
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by the way, after budget cuts they shortened it to MESS
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The mission is called MESSENGER, for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging.
They certainly did a lot of "ranging" coming up with that acronym.
Actually, ranging is an important part of any space mission. What they call "ranging" is measuring the distance from an earth station to the spacecraft and it's what allows then to calculate the orbit the spacecraft is following.
Without accurate ranging the spacecraft would either get lost in space or crash on the planet. With accurate enough ranging one can even find out details about the planer's interior. Thanks to ranging, we know that Mars has a liquid core [sciencedaily.com].
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Yes, but don't almost all non-landing probes do that as part of their standard navigation? It's almost like calling a PC a "compu-fan" because it has a fan(s) inside.
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Also, geochemistry? Shouldn't that be hermechemistry?
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So... hermeography? Hermeology?
COOL!
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But don't tell the general public that. In the old days they picked a name, such as "Pioneer", and called the probes Pioneer 1, Pioneer 2, Pioneer 3, and so on. Less awkward in my opinion.
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They certainly did a lot of "ranging" coming up with that acronym.
One of the instruments on the probe is a laser altimeter, which is a kind of LIDAR (which stands for Light Detection and Ranging). So regardless of the stupidity of the overall name, the acronym letter actually fits.
If I were in charge, though, I'd just call it "Messenger" without all-caps. The word itself is fine (and Mercury-related) without trying to cram it into a backronym.
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shoutout to NASA! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html [nasa.gov]
How is plannet formed? (Score:2, Funny)
how is plannet formed
how solarsystem get pragnent
Video from MESSENGER (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Why six years? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of gravity assist maneuvers. It is (energy wise) very difficult to get to put a probe in mercury's orbit, first you have to do a lot of braking to put it into an elliptical orbit to reach mercury's orbit then another lot of braking to make it match mercury's orbit then more braking to put it into (some sort) of elliptical orbit AROUND mercury then (optional) more braking to "circularize" your orbit around mercury!
I think energetically speaking it's about as difficult to send a probe to Mercury as it is to Jupiter even though Jupiter is much farther away. So in order to not have to use a huge (expensive booster), the probe does a bunch of gravity assists by sling-shotting near Venus, Mercury and maybe even the earth. This saves a LOT of fuel but adds a LOT of time (otherwise as you probably guessed it would've gotten there years earlier).
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I think we missed a great opportunity to try a medium sized solar sail. Say a couple of hundred metres in diameter. Inside the orbit of Venus a sail like that would be very efficient.
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Re:Why six years? (Score:4, Informative)
An object orbiting the sun could point the sail 45 degrees away from the sun so that sun light is reflected ahead in the orbit. That way pressure from sun light would slow the object down and move it into a lower orbit. Mercury is very difficult to reach because you need to dump a lot of kinetic and potential energy to match orbits with the planet. In other words you have to go a long way down the sun's gravitational well.
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You don't even really need to be able to direct the sail if you can change its surface area. Deploy to maximum at apoapsis and it will slow the craft as it approaches periapsis resulting in a lower periapsis. The hard part (using a solar sail) would be drawing in apoapsis, as you would have to exert thrust towards the sun, you would need use a more conventional thruster and undeploy the solar sail or you will end up increasing the ellipticality.
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Now, that said, if the spacecraft had enough spare capacity (power and mass wise) to pack on a small solar sail for a proof-of-concept demonstration, then, yes, it could have been a great opportunity. But if the technology was not ready
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the probe does a bunch of gravity assists by sling-shotting near Venus, Mercury and maybe even the earth.
It sling-shots around Mercury to get to Mercury?
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Yep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESSENGER#Launch_and_trajectory [wikipedia.org]
The "sling shots" are to lose momentum, rather than gain it. As far as I understand it, MESSENGER used a (relatively distant) orbital pass of Mecury to slow down, allowing it to enter it's lower altitude orbit on a later pass.
IANARocketScientist, though.
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Actually, it's easier to escape the Solar System than go into an orbit around Mercury.
Reaching Mercury from Earth poses significant technical challenges, since the planet orbits so much closer to the Sun than does the Earth. A Mercury-bound spacecraft launched from Earth must travel over 91 million kilometers into the Sun’s gravitational potential well. Mercury has an orbital speed of 48 km/s, while Earth’s orbital speed is 30 km/s. Thus the spacecraft must make a large change in velocity (delta
Graph of gravity wells (energy) (Score:1)
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Solar Syatem Simulator (Score:2)
This will let you see how things look from any spacecraft: http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
Movie "Sunshine" (Score:2)
Thinking of Mercury also makes me think of the very good horror/sci-fi movie "Sunshine". (Partial SPOILER ALERT).
I really liked it except the intensity of the Sun, even at those distances, was dialed up a bit too high. I mean, when the captain gets "blown" by the very brief exposure to the (dying) sun, it was a little too much considering he was in a very heavily heat shielded suit. And the ship wasn't even yet at Mercury's orbit! I guess just slowly being cooked to death was not dramatic enough for the
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Oh, and to add to my nit-picking, when the thermally unshielded crew members are exposed to the vacuum of space (now in shadow) they shouldn't instantly freeze solid. They would, of course, eventually do so (if they were kept in shadow) but the thermal conductivity of a vacuum is so low it would take awhile (think Thermos bottles). And evaporative cooling wouldn't be that much faster (even Bedouins in the driest deserts don't get cold from sweating). Still the writer's needed a contrast between fire and
Re:Movie "Sunshine" (Score:5, Informative)
Just a note. Oxygen transport in your body isn't based on the oxygen being dissolved in your blood. It combines chemically with the hemoglobin. So, suddenly exposed to a vacuum, you still might have some gases come out of solution in your body, so maybe the bends, and your body would swell a bit quite possibly accompanied with some discomfort. I'm not sure what would happen with sinuses and eardrums and so forth. Also, if your lungs were full, you probably wouldn't be able to contain the pressure. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to blow out your chest or anything, but there could be internal rupturing, or maybe the air would just force itself out of your mouth and nose. In any case, if you had enough oxygen in your blood to stay conscious for two minutes, then it looks like you'd stay conscious for two minutes regardless of the pressure (as long as you don't pass out from the pain of your ear drums bursting, etc.)
Hmmm. Before posting, something just occurred to me about how good a pressure vessel your lungs might actually be. I looked up the PSI trumpet players manage, because I've heard about how professionals manage to rupture their lungs sometimes and end up with air directly entering their body cavities. I found this [abel.hive.no] which says that student trumpet players were able to manage 35-50 PSI and professionals between 75-95 PSI. The question there is how much of that pressure is actually found in the lungs and how much is produced by clever use of the lungs as a lower pressure air supply, producing the pressure mostly in the mouth and feeding it with careful work? I'm not sure, but it makes it seem that it's quite possible that a healthy adult may very well be able to hold air at around 14.5 PSI without even being forced to breath out. For that matter, if they're in space in the first place, they probably weren't even breathing air at 1 atmosphere to begin with. The US space program uses a mostly oxygen atmosphere at only about 5 PSI.
So, it looks like you wouldn't want to just take a stroll out into the hard vacuum of space on a regular basis, but it looks like it's actually pretty survivable in most of our solar system.
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I think 15 seconds in vacuum is the limit. The lungs will empty immediately. Air is kept there by suction and you lose that in vacuum. Oxygen transport out of the blood and into vacuum means that the blood headed for the brain will have almost no oxygen so once that hits the brain you are gone. Having said that 15 seconds is enough to find the lever and close the door of the emergency airlock then pull the lever to blow the lock though I reckon the pulse of oxygen deprived blood would have knocked Bowman ou
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You could still be saved by others though, after those fifteen seconds. In space, the question is for how long.
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You could still be saved by others though, after those fifteen seconds. In space, the question is for how long.
This guy survived about a minute [wordpress.com]
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Little late to reply to this, but I'm going to anyway. From what I can find, it looks like you very well may be able to hold the oxygen in your lungs even in a vacuum. Air may be brought into your lungs by suction, which does rely on air pressure, but once it's in there, you hold it in with your trachea mouth, etc. It may or may not be the case that the lungs empty immediately, but what I can find suggests that you can probably manage to hold in the 5+ psi you're likely to have in your lungs. Also, even if
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I see no reason why your lungs would be weaker in explosive decompression versus slow decompression. Either they can withstand the internal pressure or they can't. Given that you'd probably only need to deal with one third atmosphere, as I go into below, it actually seems pretty likely to me that you'd be able to hold it in your lungs. Whether you did or not would probably depend on how prepared you were when the atmosphere suddenly went away.
I understand about the gas bubbles in your blood. However, I'm co
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Regarding the piece of string with the weight, that's trying to stretch an analogy just a bit. The analogy you want is a piece of string (let's give it a cross-section of exactly one square inch) with a 5 pound weight hanging from it (from a hook). Hanging there, the string is stretched a bit and has some tension on it, but isn't breaking. The correct comparison is with the same piece of string with no weight on it, then you reach over with the 5 pound weight, supporting it fully, hook it onto the string an
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You got me on sublimation. I should have changed that to evaporation. I'd originally started writing a more detailed bit about how an ice layer would form quickly due to evaporative cooling and how it would continue to sublimate but would protect the water trapped inside it, but it was too long winded and depends on conditions that aren't really present in our scenario of an astronaut blown out of a spacecraft anyway. So I erased most of it, but still ended up with sublimation in there instead of evaporatio
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You won't stay conscious for more than a few seconds.
The lungs are not a one-way system; effectively, if there is less oxygen in the lungs than there is in the blood, the lungs work in reverse and remove oxygen from the blood. At airline altitudes, the time of "useful consciousness" is something like 30 seconds. At 50,000 feet, time of useful consciousness is between 6 and 9 seconds because the lungs strip the oxygen out of the blood so efficiently. This is why if there is only one crew member in the flight
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You are completely ignoring that your skin and muscle is damn strong, and with the exception of your lungs and sinuses, most of your body is going to maintain pressure through physical restraint of your skin and muscle.
Your lungs are good at venting gas and your sinuses are mostly non critical. You are still most likely going to die, but you won't be exploding.
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I wonder how much difference the starting atmosphere makes, afaict space suits and some spacecraft use low pressure pure oxygen atmospheres.
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Unless the chromosphere of the sun is surrounding you pretty much any mirror will protect you from the sun. And the mirror doesn't have to be heavy. A thin sheet of polished metal will do fine. Good film though. Along with Moon its great to see indie SF films being made.
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It made me think of Asimov's short story, Runaround, featured in the I-Robot collection (among others, probably). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround [wikipedia.org]
I'm particularly fond of the audiobook version read by Scott Brick.
It features a funny robotics-expert duo, Donnovan and Powell, who are sent to Mercury after a failed mining mission some 20 years earlier. They have robots and plans to bring the station back on line, but of course, there's a problem... involving robots.
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And a believable scary "monster!"
You mean the seemingly psychic space zombie? Sorry, how was that believable again? Or, for that matter, even necessary to the plot?
Dammit NASA! (Score:2)
Messenger is a great name, perfectly respectable with a sort of a cute "ZOMG HI Mercury! LUV Earth!" edge to it.
And then you just had to go and fucking ruin it with a horrendous backronym didn't you.
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If It goes too fast and on target, would it become an AIM Instant Messenger?
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An opportunity too good to pass up, I suspect. Mercury was also the messenger of the gods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(mythology) [wikipedia.org]
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Those probes in uranus doesn't count.
What about the rings around Uranus?
Mercury's rotation and orbital period (Score:1)
Wikipedia:
Which is correct?
NASA is correct. (Score:1)
Rotates on its axis once every 59 Earth days, but because of its slow rotation and fast speed around the Sun, one solar day (from noon to noon at the same place) lasts 176 Earth days, or two Mercury years
Although I'd say the article is clearer, both the article and Wikipedia are technically correct because Wikipedia talks about three rotations, not days. Calculating the length of a solar day on Mercury requires accounting for the orientation of a point on Mercury to the Sun; as Mercury rotates once, it also travels through 59/88 of an orbit, so one rotation != one solar day on Mercury and the article and Wikipedia are not in con