Comments | jordan179: MESSENGER probe reveals Mercurian vulcanism

jordan179

MESSENGER probe reveals Mercurian vulcanism

Aug 04, 2010 13:03

From Saswato R. Das, Scientific American, August 4th 2010, "Mercury Rising" (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mercury-messenger-flyby) comes the report that the MESSENGER probe has discovered evidence of extensive vulcanism on ( Read more... )

mercury, science, planetology, space

Comments 7

Mmm ... lather2002 August 4 2010, 20:31:12 UTC

"Worlds for China" maybe, thanks to Bill Clinton and Barry Obama.

Re: Mmm ... jordan179 August 5 2010, 07:00:22 UTC

Yes, possibly. The Chinese, after all, are human.

But really I have no idea who will primarily colonize Mercury. I don't think settlement will begin there before 2030-2040, and it may take longer. Who knows who will dominate space exploration by the mid-21st century? The decisions made by a one-term joke like Obama will long ago have faded into background noise by then.

Re: Mmm ... brezhnev August 6 2010, 12:24:26 UTC

I don't see people settling three any time soon. As for an exploratory base, I recall that there's a crater on the north pole which would be quite suitable, since the inside is always in the shade and a heat exchanger could be raised above the crater to capture solar energy as needed, so the base wouldn't be subject to drastic swings in temperature.

I wonder if anyone else has thought of this?

Timescale for Mercurian Exploration jordan179 August 6 2010, 14:56:56 UTC

I don't see people settling three any time soon.Right now there's not that much interest in a manned mission to Mercury, in part because Mars is engaging our (the human race's) manned interplanetary intentions as the next target after planting a Lunar base. Another reason is that the technical difficulties of radiation shielding for the ship and crew are much greater if you're going in close to the Sun; 0.387 AU and thus more than 5 times as much insolation ( ... )

shockwave77598 August 5 2010, 14:00:43 UTC

Wow, that someone didn't cross my screen till you mentioned it. Thanks!

OT rant ilion7 August 5 2010, 16:44:14 UTC

"MESSENGER photographed a 290-kilometer-diameter double-ring impact crater ..."

Please allow me an off-topic rant about a subject I saw, even as a young teenager, as a self-refutation just waiting to reveal itself -- the superior "rationality" of the metric system to the English system.

The reader may recall in his schooling being assured that as the English system of measures was (for all intent and purposes) based on the proportions of the human body (and powers of 2), but the metric system of measures was based on the proportions of the planet earth (and powers of 10), that the metric system is obviously more logical and rational, and is superior.

Yet, here they are attempting to impose a terrocentric system on measures on an alien planet.

polaris93 August 6 2010, 03:11:19 UTC

I am continually astounded and fascinated by every new observation about Venus and Mercury we get from Mercury Express and Venus Express. Thanks to them and other probes, in the last 45 yesr our scientific understanding of these two planets has changed markedly. Sadly, of course, that new knowledge has put paid to the marvelous science-fiction visions of Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, and their colleagues, but we can always re-position those stories on hypothetical worlds of other stars, which wouldn't really hurt them at all. In the meantime, the great new science fiction authors such as Charles Stross and David Drake have happily adjusted to the change, creating masterpieces of science fiction such as Stross's Saturn's Children and Drake's Seas of Venus that are fully in accord with what we know about those worlds even now. (In Saturn's Children, some of the action does take place on Mercury.) Literarily speaking, we get to have our planetary cake and eat it, too. :-)