An Image from MESSENGER

The pictures are starting to come in from MESSENGER (see my earlier story).  The orbiting spacecraft obtained this shot of Mercury's surface on March 29th.  Here is NASA's description of the photo:

Bright rays, consisting of impact ejecta and secondary craters, spread across this NAC image and radiate from Debussy crater, located at the top. The image, acquired yesterday during the first orbit for which MDIS was imaging, shows just a small portion of Debussy's large system of rays in greater detail than ever previously seen. Images acquired during MESSENGER's second Mercury flyby showed that Debussy's rays extend for hundreds of kilometers across Mercury's surface. Debussy crater was named in March 2010, in honor of the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918).

You can find more photos here.

Update:  It appears water has been located on the surface of Mercury.  "One of the great ironies is that Mercury may have more ice at its poles than even our own moon," Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said at a news conference in Washington.  See the whole article here.

A Stock Market on Mars?

And now to lighten things a little.  We have all read science fiction stories of civilizations on Mars, such as Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, but one would presume the general population can separate fact from fiction.  Well, as I write about recent trips to distant locations, be it Mercury or Titan, maybe would need to reposition our telescopes and peer back at Mars for it appears we may have missed something. 

According to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who was recently speaking on World Water day, Mars may have had a thriving civilization until capitalism came along and ruined it.  Here are his words:


I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet. ... Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts.

Notice the date of this posting.  This is not an April Fool's Day joke.  Maybe our friends in Venezuela can provide some oil money to assist NASA with its Mars mission.  More exploration is always well.  Maybe we can also solve the Face on Mars mystery.  (Yes, I know NASA tried to dismiss this with science, but that's no fun.  If fantasy will get us to Mars then we might as well go with what works.)

Something New: Rain Storms on Titan

NASA's Cassini spacecraft recently captured something fascinating on Saturn's largest moon - rain showers.  However, Titan's rain consisted of liquid methane.  While not quite the same content as rain here on earth, it still represents the first example of rain outside of our planet.  And while we did not directly see the rain, what scientists noticed was a dark spot left behind by a passing cloud.  This is about as close as we will get without actually being on the surface.  Titan is said to hold hundreds of times more hydrocarbons than earth, with methane lakes the size of our Great Lakes (though you would not want to go for a swim with temperatures at about -297°F).

Mission to Mercury

On St. Patrick's Day NASA's luck was on full display with the successful placement of the MESSENGER spacecraft into Mercury's orbit.  Launched more than 6.5 years ago, this little craft traveled more than 4.9 billion miles to get to this point.  The imaging of Mercury's surface should start on March 29th and the year-long mission will officially begin on April 4th.  The image to the left is from MESSENGER's first flyby of the planet in January 2008.

 Mercury should be a fascinating study of contrasts, with a surface temperature of 845°F and yet the possibility of frozen water at its poles.  And why does Mercury have a relatively strong magnetic field when compared to Mars?  We still have plenty to learn about this little planet.

You can follow the mission here.

The Next Discovery

With the final mission of the Discovery Space Shuttle and its 27 years of service in our space program, we are looking at mothballing a big part of recent space history.  The Discovery will soon reside at Washington DC's Smithsonian museum, where future generations can see the end of one era as we begin another.  It is only fitting that Discovery's last 13-day mission related to another big part of our remaining space program - the International Space Station.

But what other discoveries await us?  We have plenty of unmanned space missions in the future, and science in the heavens continues unabated (though the loss of the Glory satellite and Orbiting Carbon Observatory was a setback), but where next for the manned missions?  Earlier this month the Indian Space Research Organization found a nice spot for a moon base.  The underground chamber was located by the Chandrayaan-1 space probe and may offer future space inhabitants a relatively safe location near the moon's equator - safe from wide temperature variances, radiation, and other surface hazards.  One of the space-faring nations will find themselves back on the moon in the near future, and the only question is whether the United States will be a participant or observer.