Mercury Flyby 1 |
Mercury Flyby 1 |
Dec 5 2007, 06:47 AM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 258 Joined: 22-December 06 Member No.: 1503 |
40 days and counting. The long wait is almost over!
I wonder whether we will get enough data to test new simulation theories like this one. http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19...solar-wind.html What do you expect from this first flyby? |
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Jan 16 2008, 09:21 AM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
Rather than "iron rich basalt", I'm thinking of iron-rich deeper crustal rocks, like those exposed in the S. Polar/Aitkin (We REALLY need to have it named Shoemaker) basin on the Moon. Much of the Mariner-10 visible floor of Caloris is smooth plains, so it appears that the original basin floor was covered by some sort of melt, but it's not lunar-mare dark, so it's either built up a thick dusting of average Mercurian crud to lighten it (I really doubt that), or is a low-iron melt, not that dramatically (or at least visibly) chemically distinct from other Mercurian plains and highlands.
All this makes the very odd dark materials of the Tolstoj basin all the odder, as other medium-large basins (seen by Mariner) don't obviously show something like that, and you'd expect Caloris would show it even more. Maybe there was something INTERESTING at intermediate crustal depth at Tolstoj that other basins didn't dig into as it wasn't present where they hit. |
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