The phone may be named Mercury, but it would certainly be a whole lot helpful to our stranded Martian friend, Matt Damon. It comes in a rugged design that looks great for extraterrestrial ventures. The upper module comes in two variants, the basic, with a 17mp camera and a loop for clipping the phone to your self. The Advanced module has a 25mp camera and a pretty huge flash… Huge enough to send SOS signals into space? I wonder.
Designer: JungJun Park
For years, scientists have wondered why Mercury is so dark. It doesn't have as much iron and titanium as the Moon, so it should be brighter. A team at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory finally has the answer, though. Thanks to a spectral anal...
NASA has been cruising around the surface of Mars with the Curiosity rover for a while now, performing all sorts of experiments and research. Curiosity has taken selfies, analyzed rocks, and searched for life on the barren red planet. Recently NASA used Curiosity for something new, to take pictures of Mercury as it transited the Sun.
This marks the first time that a planet has been seen transiting the Sun from the surface of another planet. The alignment required to watch Mercury pass in front of the Sun could only be seen from the surface of Mars.
Since curiosity’s Mastcam wasn’t designed to look at the heavens, the image isn’t exactly high quality. Mercury shows up as a blurry dot in the middle of white crosshairs in the image here. The photo was taken on June 3. Mercury won’t transit the Sun again in Mars’ view until April of next year.
[via Discovery]
Forget the face on Mars and it’s mysterious pyramid structures. The universe is even stranger than that. Case in point, Han Solo, frozen in carbonite has been spotted on the planet Mercury. NASA’s Messenger probe found a raised shape on the surface of the planet that looks just like our smuggler friend after Boba Fett caught him and put him on ice.
Here is the NASA press release on the discovery:
A portion of the terrain surrounding the northern margin of the Caloris basin hosts an elevated block in the shape of a certain carbonite-encased smuggler who can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.
If there are two things you should remember, it’s not to cross a Hutt, and that Mercury’s surface can throw up all kinds of surprises. This block may be part of the original surface that pre-dates the formation of Caloris, which was shaped by material ejected during the basin-forming event.
Looks like NASA is finally embracing its inner nerd-dork. Good job, NASA. Now get back to the Moon already. It’s right next door for God’s sake.
Cake….the final frontier. Check out this delectably sweet solar system cake from Gonzuela’s Cakes (Gonzuela Bastarache). Unlike a typical cake, this one has the decorations INSIDE the cake. That’s actually a twice baked cake and Gonzuela says it’s easy to make and then gives instructions on how to do it that don’t look easy or simple at all. To her credit she did go all old school on it and included Pluto as one of the planets. Now kids, no need to fight over who gets to eat Uranus, there’s enough for everyone. Sweet.
Researchers have been poring over data captured by the NASA Messenger probe as it conducted its study of Mercury. Amongst the data the probe discovered about the incredibly hot and small planet, were some tidbits about the composition of the surface of Mercury that left scientists curious. While studying the data, the scientists discovered that Mercury is comprised of two considerably different types of rock.
This discovery led MIT scientists to create an experiment in the lab to help identify a geological process that could have resulted in these two vastly different types of rock. The experiment subjected the rock types to different temperatures and pressures in an effort to simulate the processes that could have occurred on the surface of Mercury. The results of that experiment have led the scientists to believe that Mercury may have once had a massive ocean of piping hot magma on its surface that would have made Dr. Evil proud.
The scientists believe that the magma ocean existed sometime within the first 10 million years of Mercury’s existence, near the beginning of the formation of our solar system. The scientists estimate that the magma ocean would’ve existed over 4 billion years ago. Ancient Mercury sounds a lot like Mustafar, the planet where Anakin burst into flames on his path to becoming Darth Vader.
[via Forbes]
While the Mars Curiosity rover has garnered most of our space-gazing attention lately, another of NASA's spacecraft has made quite a momentous discovery on an entirely different planet. The Messenger space probe (which stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) has found new evidence for ice on Mercury, which is surprising given its proximity to the sun. Thanks to a subtly tilted axis, many of the planet's polar craters never see the light of day, and can dip to temperatures as low as minus 370 Fahrenheit. Indeed, scientists claim there's 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of ice on Mercury -- David Lawrence, a Messenger participating scientist, said that "if spread over an area the size of Washington, D.C., [the ice] would be more than two miles thick." The Messenger, which only started orbiting Mercury last year, helped confirm scientists' conclusions by capturing detailed images of the planet's surface, measuring the craters' reflectivity and utilizing a neutron spectrometer that discovered the presence of excess hydrogen. Scientists even found slightly warmer regions on Mercury that might be temperate enough for, well, a colony: "People joke about it, but it's not so crazy, really," said David A. Paige, a UCLA professor quoted in the New York Times. Of course, this is assuming we don't boil or freeze to death on our way there. For more information about the find, check out the press release below.
Continue reading NASA finds new evidence of ice in Mercury's polar craters
Source: John Hopkins University APL, New York Times, NASA