Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion |
Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion |
Mar 21 2006, 12:18 AM
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 40 Joined: 20-March 06 Member No.: 720 |
How will it be to make a manned landing at Mercury at its closest to the sun (perihelion) on its equator when the sun is in the zenith ,what are the dangers of a landing then? Do we need to be protected against the sunheat and radiation then? How strong is the heat and radiation of the sun then ,and is it dangerous when the solaractivity is high then? What kind of spacesuits do we need then? Better protected suits than we have used on the apollo moonlandings i think. Can you explain how a landing on Mercury will be when it is at perihelion and land on its equator with the sun directly overhead? I hope it will ever happen. Lets start discuss about it.
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Mar 22 2006, 11:12 AM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
A long lived Mercury lander would have decidedly different objectives from a short-lived one. Also is the landing terrain: normal regolith versus polar ice deposits.
A short life lander could do Surveyor type imaging of the local regolith, but with real UV to mid IR specteral capability. You might have a slow-scan imaging spectrometer that wouild build up a few complete pans at good resoluton over a lander's life. Then you'd have an instrumentation suite that would do Hydrogen to Uranium elemental abundances of samples, isotope measurements, and precision mineralogy. A long life lander would have to characterize the landing site with imaging and the like, but it's primary goals would be geophysical: Seismic, Magnetic fields, atmosphere, solar-wind interaction. Mercury has massive polar ice deposits in permanently shadowed crater bottoms and other locations. Radar data show the deposits are 1) thick, and 2) non-atennuating, with high internal scattering. We see exactly the same type radar return from the exposed permanent martian ice caps (*not* the ice under dirt surrounding the poles), and on Ganymede, Callisto, Europa. Lunar polar ice, which is probably present in small amounts, nowhere has shown the strong depolarized return of these other deposits, and probably consist of some percent of ice mixed with regolity in the cold traps. A Mercury Polar Ice explorer will be of great scientific interest, but it's a very long term priority. |
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