MESSENGER News Thread, news, updates and discussion Options

[Hungry4info]

They've just released a huge global map with four versions at different resolutions from 2.5 km/px to 250 m/px.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/mosaics.html

[JimOberg]

Nov. 26, 2012
MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-219
NASA HOSTS NOV. 29 NEWS CONFERENCE ABOUT MERCURY POLAR REGIONS

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Nov, 29, to reveal new observations from the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. The briefing will be held in the NASA Headquarters auditorium, located at 300 E St. SW in Washington.
Science Journal has embargoed details until 2 p.m. on Nov. 29. The news conference will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website.
NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER spacecraft has been studying Mercury in unprecedented
detail since its historic arrival there in March 2011.

The news conference participants are:
- Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Sean Solomon, MESSENGER Principal Investigator, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, N.Y.
- David Lawrence, MESSENGER Participating Scientist, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
- Gregory Neumann, Mercury Laser Altimeter Instrument Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- David Paige, MESSENGER Participating Scientist, University of California, Los Angeles

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and schedule information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

[stewjack]

Just a bump to remind people that NASA will host a news conference at 2 p.m. EST ( 19:00 GMT/UTC ) on Thursday, Nov, 29, to reveal new observations from the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury.

NOV. 29 NEWS CONFERENCE ABOUT MERCURY POLAR REGIONS

LINKS
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html

[Explorer1]

Started now....

[Explorer1]

And it looks like an ice match! Perfect fit on the graph, quantitative agrees with water ice presence!
'Very compelling evidence'
When combined with south pole: 100 billion to 1 trillion metric tons....

[Seryddwr]

Wow. That's a LOT of ice.

[Explorer1]

They're talking about MLA and reflectivity now. Love the current speakers tie....
I have to leave now, hope to catch the rerun on ustream.
More stuff on the messenger website:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/

[Seryddwr]

Is that a 'solar system planets' tie?

I gotta get me one of those!...

[Fran Ontanaya]

So, what rocky bodies we have left with no water ice? Io and Vesta?

[centsworth_II]

Venus?

[JRehling]

Phobos and Deimos, possibly. If the mean annual temperature of a very small body is >0C, then that should be the interior temperature, so the shortest-period asteroids seem very unlikely to have ice. Small bodies with interior temperatures -100C to 0C... well, who knows? In a case like that (including Phobos and Deimos) ice could be stable in the interior, so whether or not it is present depends on the body's formation history.

[elakdawalla]

Venus, yes. Vesta has water in the same way that most of the Moon does, bound in hydrated minerals. It doesn't have evidence for polar water that the Moon does though.

Still, it's not really a surprise that everything outside of Earth's orbit except maybe asteroids on the inner part of the asteroid belt has water on it. A more interesting question, I think, is which ones have liquid water. There, Mars is still a question mark. Many icy moons do, though some outer ones don't. Several large KBOs may.

[Fran Ontanaya]

My bad, how did I forget Venus.

I kinda feel these last decades' shift to today's "water ice is the norm in most large rocky bodies, and liquid water not a one in a billion thing" is a Great Discovery worth singling, as much as finding the Earth is a sphere or that a whole continent was missing from Western World's maps. Water ice on Mercury, of all places, sort of wraps it. Once we get the definitive confirmation it should be a date worth remembering.

[Paolo]

I was reading the three latest Science papers and there is one thing that strikes me: the deposits are said to be some tens of million years old. This implies that the spin axis of Mercury must be relatively stable, More stable in fact than that of Mars. Isn't this counter-intuitive? I thought a fast rotator like Mars would be more stable than a slow rotator like Mercury...

[Explorer1]

The lack of big stabilizing moon (or any moon at all for that matter) should also make the axis unstable. And it's not tidally locked to the sun either.
Or maybe the 3:2 resonance does so in some way?