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 17 2008, 10:53 AM
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#2
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Rover Driver Group: Members Posts: 1015 Joined: 4-March 04 Member No.: 47 |
From Emily's blog:
QUOTE So what do I see in this image? There's lots of craters, of course, but if you look closely at the craters you can see that there's a lot of differences among them. In particular, my eye is immediately drawn to the fact that the craters at the left side of the image mostly have very flat floors, but among them are a few craters that have fairly pristine bowl shapes and central peaks. When craters first form, they all have bowl shapes, or bowls with central peaks, or peak rings. Craters do not form with smooth, flat floors. So something must have happened -- some geologic activity -- to flatten the floors of all those flat craters; most likely they got filled in by some volcanic eruptions. Those volcanic eruptions had to happen before the central-peak craters, which never got filled in by lava. So already there is a geologic history to tell about this tiny area of Mercury, coming out of this one image. As a complete layman, I wonder: if it's filled in by some lava flow from a volcano, wouldn't you see something at the edges of the crater instead of a nice uninterrupted ring? Or a volcano? These seem much smaller scales than on the moon where I assume a similar thing happed at the Mares. I wonder if it isn't just that below a thin crust the rock is rather soft or 'liquid' (over geological timescales) and that the floor just equilibriated like a lake before cooling down, whereas the ring around it is more rigid, since it is cold crustal material. Please teach me about crater formation edit - or is what I'm talking about a 'welded basin ejecta blankets'?? |
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