Tag archives for mercury
Sky-watchers this week get a chance to go eye to eye with a cosmic scorpion and witness a magnificent meeting of three neighboring worlds in the evening skies.
The lunar wall comes into view, three planets huddle, and the moon joins the Leo constellation in this week’s best sky events.
Posted by 
It’s rare that astronomers declare news with great certainty, so the announcement that water ice was confirmed in Mercury’s poles is an “exclamation point.” The amount of ice is also astounding—100 billion to a trillion metric tons, or something like layering Washington, D.C. with 2 to 2.5 miles of ice.
Posted by 
The following piece was originally published by the Center for American Progress. It seems there’s a never-ending see-saw battle in scientific research about certain consumables. Red wine will decrease incidence of cardiovascular disease! No it won’t. Dark chocolate will lower your body mass index! Or not. Seafood is no different. For every report that Omega…
A New World for Tolkien
Posted by Cathy Hunter on August 16, 2012 
J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is one of the latest from the world of fine arts to be commemorated with his own crater on Mercury. He keeps good company with the likes of Prokofiev, Goethe, and Mendelssohn.
Night Sky News: Planets Dazzle Holiday Skies
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on December 24, 2011 
This holiday season skywatchers get to witness five planets hanging like ornaments in the skies above. All throughout the end of the month you can catch the five classical naked-eye planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all of which were first seen by astronomers in ancient Greek and Roman times. First up…
Posted by In Roman mythology, Mercury was the fleet-footed messenger to the gods. It’s therefore fitting that NASA went to great pains to name the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury MESSENGER. That’s an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. (Personally, I would have tried to find a way to name the orbiter…
Night Sky News: Tiny Mercury Easy to See This Week
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on March 14, 2011 Of the eight planets in our solar system, five are visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Known since ancient times, these naked-eye planets appear similar to stars, but they “wander” across the sky instead of staying in fixed positions relative to each other. Knowing where a planet will pop up…
It’s been four years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) ruled that Pluto is no longer a planet, and the subject remains almost as divisive as the political rumble over climate change. But it turns out that Pluto was creating kerfuffles almost from the moment it was discovered—even among world-reknowned composers. If [like me] you’re…
The closer stuff is to the sun, the harder it is to see. —Image courtesy SOHO (ESA & NASA) That’s the fundamental problem with vulcanoids, a hypothetical band of asteroids orbiting between the sun and the closest planet in, Mercury. In fact, for years that was the problem with studying Mercury, since looking at the…
In December 2008 NASA put out a press release that pretty much cinches the upcoming retirement of the space shuttle program: Shuttles for sale, $42 million/ea. Well, it’s not really that the shuttles are gonna cost ya—that’s just the price for shipping and handling. And if you’re really keen, lucky for you, the cost has…
At 5:55 p.m. ET today, the MESSENGER spacecraft will make its closest pass in its third and final flyby of the innermost planet. Mercury, as seen from MESSENGER on September 28, 2009 —Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington When images from the flyby start pouring in around midnight, scientists hope…
It’s tiny, it’s pockmarked, and it’s got almost no atmosphere. So it’s probably small wonder that we cared so little for poor Mercury that we couldn’t be bothered to check out a whole half of the planet until 2008. —Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institute of Washington But when we…
What’s going on inside a gas giant? Sending spacecraft in to investigate is a risky proposition—the deeper you go, the higher the heat and pressure, so you’d be burned up and/or crushed before you got far enough to record much. But thanks to various probes and telescopes operating at safer depths, we know a good…
It’s been just over two weeks since the MESSENGER spacecraft swooped past Mercury during its second flyby of the innermost planet. Since the initial fervor, the MESSENGER team has been faithfully releasing images collected during the close encounter, some of which are providing data-hungry scientists with fodder for speculation about Mercury’s geologic processes. Today’s offering…
Sometimes it’s possible to be too close to a problem. For example, how would a citizen of Whoville living on a speck of dust know what another speck of dust several light-years away is supposed to look like? The situation is much the same on Earth. Earth, as seen from Mars in 2004 —Image courtesy…
—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington NASA’s MESSENGER space probe sent some postcards home this morning from its second jaunt past Mercury, that tiny planet nearest to the sun. The flyby is part of some maneuvering MESSENGER has to do to ease itself from orbiting the sun to orbiting Mercury.…
At 4:40 EST today NASA’s MESSENGER space probe passed just 124 miles (200 kilometers) over the nearest planet to the sun. The move marked the closest approach MESSENGER will make during its second Mercury flyby, part of its maneuvering to settle neatly into orbit in 2011. The first flyby in January produced some amazing pictures…
As anyone who’s recently cleaned their attic can tell you, unexpectedly finding a large spider sitting in a dark, hidden part of your home can elicit excitement, consternation, and sometimes a family squabble. Apparently it’s no different if you are a planetary scientist, even when the home in question is the solar system and the…
As a professional skeptic, I’d be hard pressed to trust a doctor who thinks my right ankle aches because my ruling planet Jupiter is in retrograde. Image courtesy NASA But that’s just me, and medical astrology—a fairly common diagnostic tool during medieval times—is still alive and kicking in several parts of the world. In fact,…
