Messages from Inside

“Inside” meaning the inner part of the Solar System. “Messages” meaning the new pictures from MESSENGER spacecraft.

MESSENGER is short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. Now you and I know that they spent a bit of time coming up with the unpacking of the name, wanting of course to have the name MESSENGER because that’s what the Mercury of mythology was – the messenger of the Gods, among his other duties. Nice. However I’d have been really impressed if they’d managed to call it QUICKSILVER, and found a way to unpack that – any takers?

Anyway, I digress. In more news showing the triumph of the wisdom of relatively cheap unmanned exploratory craft, MESSENGER sent some wonderful pictures of Mercury this week, along with lots of other scientific data that will help us learn a great deal about the innermost planet. Here’s the one that’s been going around a lot (click for impressive larger version):

Image credit to NASA. Caption taken from a space.com article reads: This photo supplied by NASA shows this view of Mercury’s rugged, cratered landscape illuminated obliquely by the sun, taken by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft on Monday,Jan. 14, 2008. This image was taken from a distance of approximately 11,000 miles, about 56 minutes before the spacecraft’s closest encounter with Mercury. It shows a region 300 miles across including craters less than a mile wide. The large, shadow-filled, double ringed crater to the upper right was glimpsed by Mariner 10 more than three decades ago and named Vivaldi, after the Italian composer.

There’s more to come, I hear. In the meantime, have a read of the rather good Space.com article by Tariq Malik (via Yahoo News), which also has lots of links to more information.

-cvj