NASA's Messenger closes on Mercury

@AC

You're not wrong there!

Let's hope they got their maths correct this time, and didn't mix up their imperial and metric units again, or they'll by adding a new crater to the surface.

/me wonders about the sanity of anyone doing scientific calculations with imperial units.

Re: Acronym

Wasn't Mercury the messenger of the gods in ancient mythology? The mission/orbiter name sounds more like a backronym to me...

@Steve Evans

You're not wrong there either!

But it might depend on whether they added in the relativistic orbital precession.

@ Steve Evans

Oh yes, because the current ridiculously silly system of measurement is any better than the older ridiculously silly system of measurement. Let's not even mention the fact that the metric system was mainly adopted due to its ease of conversion and, well, that's just about it. One system is no more accurate than the other, as they were both based on completely unscientific principles.

craters

Hard to imagine a crater that size in proportion to the planet. How to you leave a crater 1/4 the diameter of the planet, w/o destroying the planet (erasing the crater.) Or at least "liquifying" the planet, erasing the crater. Must have been a large, slow, low density object?

is this probe to stay around Mercury?

if I'm reading it right, it'll eventually settle into permanent orbit around Mercury? Or is it 'settling" somewhere else? I'm assuming it's not going for solar orbit?

@ AC

At least the current "ridiculously silly system of measurement" is based on something constant and universal. Water if memory serves... Certainly much better than how large some guys pedaling extremities were...

ridiculously silly?

"Oh yes, because the current ridiculously silly system of measurement is any better than the older ridiculously silly system of measurement."

Of course all measurement systems have to fix the basic units for mass, length, time, etc. by plucking some sort of measurement out of the air, so to speak. But there's a more to a measurement system than that.

Unlike the imperial system, all the derived units of SI are based on just a couple of basic units, like the second, metre, and kilogramme. In SI, the unit of energy is one joule = 1 J = 1 kg * 1 m^2 / 1 s^2. Similarly, the electrical units are all defined based on the unit of electric current, the ampere (A), and the other basic units. For isntance, the unit of electric charge is the coulomb (C), and it's defined as 1 C = 1 A * 1 S. The unit of resistance, the ohm, is defined as 1 <omega-symbol> = ( 1 m^2 * 1 kg ) / ( 1 s^3 * 1 A^2 ). Conversions are a cinch.

As everyone knows, the SI units can be prefixed to gain others that are larger or smaller by exact magnitudes of ten, making calculations a lot easier. On the other hand, the imperial systen has silly pseudo-random conversions even within the units of a single measurement, for instance in length: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 yard = 3 feet, etc., etc. How silly is that? How can you say the measurement systems are equally silly?

And what, pray, would be a measurement system based on "scientific principles", if neither imperial nor SI are? I'm really curious as to what you mean by the phrase "scientific principle" in this context.