The space probe, Messenger has collected over 1,200 images of Mercury since its arrival on January 14, 2008, and it shows that Mercury is even more unlike Earth’s Moon than was once estimated. One site on Mercury’s previously-hidden surface has been named the spider for its spider-like appearance, with a crater in the center with hundreds of lines radiating out from it.
Surprises Stream Back From Mercury’s Messenger
by Staff Writers
Laurel MD (SPX) Jan 31, 2008After a journey of more than 2.2 billion miles and three and a half years, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft made its first flyby of Mercury just after 2 p.m. EST on Jan. 14, 2008. All seven scientific instruments worked flawlessly, producing a stream of surprises that is amazing and delighting the science team.
“MESSENGER has shown that Mercury is even more different from the Moon than we’d thought,” said Science Team co-investigator James Head, professor at Brown University and chair of the mission’s Geology Discipline Group. The tiny spacecraft discovered a unique feature that the scientists dubbed “The Spider.”
This type of formation has never been seen on Mercury before, and nothing like it has been observed on the Moon. It is in the middle of the Caloris basin and consists of over a hundred narrow, flat-floored troughs (called graben) radiating from a complex central region. “The Spider” has a crater near its center, but whether that crater is related to the original formation or came later is not clear at this time.
Unlike the Moon, Mercury also has huge cliffs or scarps, structures snaking up to hundreds of miles across the planet’s face, tracing patterns of fault activity from early in Mercury’s — and the solar system’s — history.
I suppose the fact that they chose to call the lines “Graben,” German for graves, shouldn’t be any more unusual than the original word for Mars’ surface anomalies, “Canale,” Italian for channels. However, the thought of having anything called “graves” on a planet that is supposed to be uninhabited is a bit disconcerting.
Still, this could prove important to discovering the solar system’s history, as well as seeing what impactors can do to a planet without endangering ourselves to find that out.
Catch you on the backside!
Janice Manning
