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Posted on 07/07/2008 9:37:56 PM PDT by neverdem
Mercury, the smallest planet, bakes in the heat of the Sun, but it has water in some form. It has volcanoes. It appears to have an active magnetic field generated by a molten iron core. And it has shrunk more than scientists thought.
Those are some of the findings gleaned from the flyby of NASA’s Messenger spacecraft in January, the first close-up look since Mariner 10 flew by three times in the 1970s.
“After five months of analysis, we’ve got some fascinating new results, and some of them have resolved debates that are more than 30 years old that go back to the time of Mariner 10,” said Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for Messenger, during a NASA telephone news conference on Thursday. “All of which bodes very well for the rest of the mission.”
Messenger will make two more flybys, the next one on Oct. 6, before entering orbit around Mercury in 2011.
Eleven papers describing the Messenger findings on Mercury appear in the current issue of the journal Science.
The first flyby has already answered one question, about the presence of volcanoes, by discovering a huge one, 60 miles in diameter. “Which is larger than the state of Delaware and over twice the size of Rhode Island,” said James W. Head III, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and the lead author of one of the papers in Science.
Atop the volcano is a kidney-shaped crater 14 miles in diameter.
“This is equivalent to a huge hole in the ground extending from the Washington Monument out to well past the Beltway,” Dr. Head...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping!
We've already got one (at least in terms of intelligent leadership).
Researcher Retreats on Sexual Enhancement Claim for Watermelon PR & marketing scam!
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Now that is positively devastating....the commercials will continue ,,,,now!
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