Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion |
Landing on Mercury on equator at perihelion |
Mar 21 2006, 12:18 AM
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#1
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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, 08:15 AM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
I'm assuming he wasn't. It was pretty obscure science at the time. Planetary radio was barely able to measure whole-disk brightness temperatures of planets as a crude function of wavelength and phase angle, and maybe some indication of limb darkening at the shortest wavelengths.
It was a *** THIS IS WEIRD *** type of observation leaving them wondering about calibration and the like. |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Mar 22 2006, 08:25 PM
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#3
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Guests |
I'm assuming he wasn't. It was pretty obscure science at the time. Planetary radio was barely able to measure whole-disk brightness temperatures of planets as a crude function of wavelength and phase angle, and maybe some indication of limb darkening at the shortest wavelengths. It was a *** THIS IS WEIRD *** type of observation leaving them wondering about calibration and the like. Yeah, and at the time the idea that Mercury's rotation was synchronous was Holy Writ -- NOBODY questioned it, so nobody thought of that explanation. (As Clarke says, "In 1965 we learned that the only thing we knew about Mercury was wrong" -- and a hell of a lot of SF stories bit the dust (although those involving the dayside's high temperatures are really as valid as ever). Incidentally, one instrument on the original strawman list of instruments for Mariner 10 back when they were first planning it (before the actual instrument solicitation) was a copy of the High Resolution IR Radiometer on the Nimbus satellites, which could have imaged the nightside's temperature differences and thus perhaps gotten at least some information on surface features. They also considered a gamma ray spectrometer, but presumably decided that it wouldn't have time to gather good compositional data. Unfortunately, at that time nobody was thinking about near-IR spectrometers as compositional instruments on spacecraft. |
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