Mercury Landers |
Mercury Landers |
Aug 15 2005, 03:36 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 212 Joined: 19-July 05 Member No.: 442 |
While the likelyhood of a Mercury Lander mission is very low, I was wondering if any planning/studies have been done on such a project?
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Aug 16 2005, 07:53 PM
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#2
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Guests |
(1) That Mercury smash-and-grab mission is a real idea -- in fact (although I know virtually nothing about it), there was apprently at one point a Discovery proposal to do just that for one of Mercury's polar regions (to also try and obtain information on the polar deposit composition).
(2) Actually, it is thought likely that Mercury's regolith differs somehat in closeup appearance from the Moon's simply because meteoroids have been smashing into it at much higher speed. At a mnimum, there should be a lot more melted impact glass mixed into it. It's questionable, however, whether any such differences would be interesting enough to be worth a camera. But: (3) A Mercury lander WOULD have a lot more uses. We very badly need to know more about the planet's strange internal structure -- for which seismometers, magnetometers, and (if possible) heat flow probes would be invaluable. In fact, just plain old measurements of the planet's libration rate by tracking a lander would be very informative about its interior -- Stanton Peale once suggested a Mercury lander that would do nothing else whatsoever! And while we might be able to get good data on the element makeup of Mercury's crust from a smash-and-grab mission, there are also some important mineralogy measurements (Raman, Mossbauer, X-ray diffractometry) that could probably be done neitehr by such a mission nor by an orbiter. Finally, a surface lander might tell us more about the planet's super-rarified atmosphere than we could discover from an orbiter. |
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