Topic narrowing

Well my topic has narrowed somewhat, although it’s still huge, and I’m not sure what the expected timeline is going to be like. I think the idea was to have a fair bit done before MESSENGER flies by Mercury for the first time in January, and that doesn’t seem like a lot of time to me. Who knows.

By the way, MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging mission. Come on, guys, keeping the first two letters of half the words? It’s a stretch. NASA must have a contest for these names or something. “What kind of research can we do so that the name of the mission turns out to be MESSENGER? Because, like, Mercury is the Latin version of Hermes, who was…you know…a messenger…I guess we’ll have to include geochem.”

Why does the name have to be an acronym anyway?

About meg

I think planets are cool! I'm a new graduate student in Planetary Science at Caltech, and at the moment I'm interested in planetary geophysics of terrestrial planets and moons. I'm originally from Cortlandt Manor, NY, and I did my undergrad at MIT, where I got heavily involved in student theater - a hobby I hope to continue through grad school, time permitting... I also like to read sci-fi/fantasy novels, obsess about English history, and play frisbee.
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4 Responses to Topic narrowing

  1. Hanna says:

    neat! – so, does that mean that once this messenger thing flies by, you’ll get all sorts of new interesting data to add to your thesis? i didn’t even know we had stuff flying to mercury. is there an inventory somewhere online of all the stuff we’ve sent to far away places?

  2. meg says:

    It means that maybe I’ll get to compare model results to data…if the model gets results by then…

    The only other spacecraft to fly by Mercury was Mariner 10 in the ’70s, and it only imaged 45% of the surface or so, and not at a high resolution. So probably the Messenger stuff will be awesome =) Nobody knows what it will look like on the other side, and it’ll make elevation measurements of the parts it flies over, so the gravity field and topography can be worked on.

    Hm an inventory? You could try http://www.nasa.gov, but I don’t know if they have a list outright. There are lots of missions flying right now, and pretty much always. The cool ones that I can think of right now are Messenger, New Horizons, which is on its way to Pluto, and the Phoenix lander and Mars Science Laboratory, which are both going to Mars (Phoenix has launched, going to one of the poles I think, and MSL is still heavily into landing-site debates). Oh, also there’s a mission to the Moon coming up called M^3 (Moon Minerology Mapper). And Cassini is still operating near Saturn, and so are the rovers on Mars. That’s all I can think of =)

  3. Annie says:

    NASA is obsessed with acronyms. on the JPL homepage (from on-site), they actually have a search engine where you can type in any acronym and it will tell you the exact definition. i’m not kidding–it was part of our JPL orientation.

  4. Annie says:

    planetary.org (The Planetary Society’s webpage) has a really good inventory of all the spacecraft ever launched. its not all in one place, but you can look up individual topics and it will tell you everything–including non-american things.

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