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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Jan 8 2007, 12:43 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
The helium 3 is a fraction (in very approximate primordial proportion) of the total helium in the sun and thus the solar wind. (Earth's traces of helium are almost entirely "new" atoms from alpha-particle decay of uranium and thorium and their decay-chains of nucleids. Earth lost most of its helium 3 and only traces show up in certain natural gas wells that contain some primordial gas leaking from inside the Earth)
The solar wind impacts the soil and high velocity nucleii in the wind are "implanted" some micrometers into the impact glass and mineral grains of the regolith. As the regolith gets repeat-pounded by small meteor impacts, it's progressively re-re-re-re shock melted and mixed with regolith glass and mineral fragments. As it gets older, it approaches a steady state where most of the soil is glass and it's just reprocessed in-place, slowly getting thicker from random larger impacts as it gets older. On mercury, impact gardening may be somewhat faster than on the moon, while solar wind impact will be significantly larger, but the higher surface temps (baking out the soil) at low latitude and the nature of the re-processing of regolith may result in an only modest increase in the helium-3 content per kilo of regolith. Helium 3 mining is a fantasy for the near and intermediate term future. Fusion power is always 50 years in the future <who said that?>, and deuterium/helium-3 fusion is harder than deuterium/tritium or deuterium/deuterium fusion due to the presence of 2 protons in the He-3 nucleus. |
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