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[mmcirvin]

Eight days to Mercury.

Comments

[jarai.livejournal.com]

I had no idea this was even launched. This ought to be pretty cool. I'd be curious to see a modern mission to Venus as well.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There is a modern mission to Venus going on right now, the ESA's Venus Express.

MESSENGER did fly by Venus and took a few shots on the way, though it wasn't a major target. Venus is actually much better explored already than Mercury, since aside from Venus Express, the Magellan spacecraft mapped the whole planet in radar in the early 1990s and there have also been several probes and landers. The only mission ever to reach Mercury so far was Mariner 10 in 1974, which did a single flyby and only took pictures of half the planet. This flyby is going to cover terrain that has never been seen at close range before.

MESSENGER will eventually go into orbit around Mercury in 2011, and the ESA's BepiColombo spacecraft will go there in 2019.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here are some Venus Express pictures. (http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=39432) It's mostly observing the atmosphere and ionosphere, though it can get some surface details in the infrared.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

Mariner 10 actually flew by Mercury three times. But every time it flew over the same side of Mercury leaving the other half as Terra incognita.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ah, I stand corrected.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

Good grief... time flies, doesn't it!

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these posts. I love astronomy for its own sake but it's hard to keep up beyond APOD; if you found more good links in the future and chose to post them, you'd make me very happy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A great place to look for solar-system exploration updates is Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society blog (http://www.planetary.org/blog/). The recent post on the GRAIL mission to the Moon is interesting--there seems to be a wave of missions going on in which formation-flying satellites are used to map gravity fields.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My favorite thing about that home page is the "miles traveled" ticker. That thing is booking--in fact, right now it's going too fast even to catch Mercury (the fastest planet) and go into orbit, which is why there have to be all these flybys first. I assume the coordinates are heliocentric.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I was just enjoying that one, too. I wish it updated at a higher rate, so you'd really get to see those miles flashing by.