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, 05:41 PM
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#2
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Solar System Cartographer Group: Members Posts: 10226 Joined: 5-April 05 From: Canada Member No.: 227 |
"In fact, some of the collapsed lava tube features appear to originate from those bright craters that I think might be caldera."
No... this is exactly the kind of argument that was fought back and forth for decades about the Moon. Read Don Wilhelms' "To a Rocky Moon" to see how it turned out. The bright fresh craters are impact craters. No calderas like those on Mars are to be expected here, and calderas don't look like this anyway - this is a fresh impact crater with some terracing in its walls, like Kepler. Check out Arsia Mons or Olympus Mons to see what calderas would be like. And what do we expect to see radiating away from fresh impact craters? - chains of secondaries, like those around Copernicus on the Moon. No reliable identification of any volcanic feature has been made yet on Mercury - no flow fronts, no sinuous rille type lava valleys, no vents. There is a suspected but FAR from certain dome. Like many people I will be looking for volcanic features in these new images. But the features you identify are classic impact morphologies. Mercury isn't Io, so we know the balance of features has to be at least 99% impact plus a few (if any) volcanic features, just like the Moon. The features you point out are actually very common on Mercury. If your features are volcanic, so is pretty much everything else. That's another line of argument that these are not volcanic. But keep looking! The real thing might be out there. Phil -------------------- ... because the Solar System ain't gonna map itself.
Also to be found posting similar content on https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke Maps for download (free PDF: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...Cartography.pdf NOTE: everything created by me which I post on UMSF is considered to be in the public domain (NOT CC, public domain) |
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