mercury rising

The MESSENGER spacecraft flew past Mercury on January 14th at a distance of only 124 miles. This historic flyby provided NASA with 500MB of data which has been safely downloaded to earth. The flyby also gave us more than 1200 photos covering nearly six million square miles of previously unseen terrain.

One of the first images beamed back from the spacecraft revealed a side of Mercury researchers have been waiting three decades to see. The cratered expanse pictured above was mostly in darkness 30 years ago when NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft made the first and (until now) only flybys of Mercury. Last week, MESSENGER caught the terrain in sunlight for the first time. Caloris Basin is circled in the photo. At first glance, the photo seems to show little more than a wasteland of craters, but researchers are excited. Caloris Basin is the biggest known impact crater on Mercury and one of the biggest craters in the entire solar system.

In the mid-1970s, Mariner 10 caught a tantalizing glimpse of the basin's edge, a ring of shadowed mountains thrown up long ago by some catastrophic impact. A comet or asteroid had smashed Mercury and gouged a crater bigger than the state of Texas. What was inside? No one could say.

MESSENGER snapped the picture that geologists had long wanted: Caloris in its entirety, a top-down view in broad daylight—and the results were surprising. Many experts expected the interior of Caloris Basin to be dark, like the dark 'seas' of hardened lava that fill major impact basins on the Moon and give anthropomorphic form to the "Man in the Moon." Instead, Caloris is bright inside and pitted with regions of interesting color.

This is just the first of three flybys in preparation for orbit insertion in 2011. The next encounters are scheduled for October 2008 and September 2009. More than a third of Mercury's surface has yet to be photographed and those flybys will fill in many gaps. Meanwhile, researchers are fully occupied with the results of this flyby.

Information for this post courtesy of NASA.
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Song 270: Iron Man
Artist: Black Sabbath
Album: Paranoid
Year: 1971
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Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
Well just pass him there
Why should we even care?

He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind

Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold

Now the time is here
For iron man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved

Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge

Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron man lives again!