Don't shoot the Messenger: NASA's suicide probe to punch hole in Mercury On April 30, a 16-metre-wide crater will be formed on the surface of Mercury by the hand of Man. Well, actually, by NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (Messenger) spacecraft, which will end its 11-year mission by piling into the planet's surface at 3.9km per second (8,724 MPH). The probe is …
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"Well, British engineering helped to contribute to advances in that field, * cough * Beagle 2 * cough *."
Excuse me old bean, but I think you'll find that Beagle 2 made a superb landing on its intended target, although unfortunately the dratted thing couldn't phone home due to one the solar panel thingies not deploying in ship-shape and Bristol fashion. Bah! Wouldn't have happened in my day.
Indeed, if one requires a stellar example of a probe smearing itself liberally all over another planetary body, one needs look no further than NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter. Harumph! Serves them right for using this new fangled, foreign metric doodah.
So sorry, must go, Veronica's out on the verandah and seems to have run out of gin again.
Yours etc.,
Colonel Algernon Rufford-Buffington (Retired)
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Instead of smashing it into Mercury, it would have been far more dramatic and poetic if NASA had set Messenger's controls for the heart of the Sun.
What did Messenger launch? Surely there is a missing direct object there?
'The BepiColombo spacecraft, a joint mission of the European and Japanese space agencies, will blast off, and may, seven years later, start adding to our knowledge of the Sun's closest planet.'
Fixed that for you. BTW, thanks for using 'blast off' in that passage, 'launch' as an intransitive is so barbaric. The USA or NASA launched Messenger.
More seriously, suppose I should pay some attention to the photos from Messenger, Mercury seems to look like the Moon, only flatter. If only the old tidal-locking theory had been correct, slow rotation instead is a little dull.
"Solomon said that the discovery had been a massive problem for astro-boffins who spend their days building complex software models explaining how the early Solar System formed. These simulations had to be junked and redone in light of Messenger's discoveries."
Global warming/climate change modeling, anyone? No-one will *ever* admit it might be wrong.
In my younger days I was an amateur astro-boffin aspiring to be a professional astro-boffin despite my predilection for sunlight. It took a while for it to penetrate my thick skull that I was never going to develop the math skills to work in the field. Until then I swam in these waters and the myriad of places where we've waved our hands at things we think are true without knowing why they are true are truly mind boggling. That we've managed to understand as much as we do is truly an amazing feat. In astronomy, the leaps are excusable because we can't actually test the bits and pieces where we wave our hands, and astro boffins WOULD if they could. It makes the same leaps all the more glaring when you see the Warmists do the same things, and all the more damning knowing we CAN test many of those.
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