NASA’s MESSENGER mission made its first flyby of Mercury last weekend, and everything seems to have gone really well. It’s so cool! We haven’t been there since 1975, and Mariner 10 left more than half the surface unimaged. This flyby got one of the missing quarters, and the next encounter (in November I think) will get the rest. Here’s a (large) picture:
Mercury’s New Quarter
Ok, so Mercury’s not that photogenic maybe, but it’s pretty neat. Those spidery ridge things that intersect craters are what my giant finite-element code is supposed to predict. Well, its supposed to predict their orientations – their existence is pretty much an initial condition.
I need to figure out if I should try to go to LPSC or not. It will be buzzing with Mercury talks (unlike AGU), but I’m not presenting anything, and I don’t know if Oded will want to send me to loaf again. We’ll see. There’s a fund for first years to go to a conference that I didn’t have to apply for to get to AGU, so I could try that instead.
