Re: NASA Sending a MESSENGER to Mercury

From: Henry Spencer (henry_at_spsystems.net)
Date: 07/24/04 

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 02:16:32 GMT

In article <a7360068.0407231555.1a2495f9@posting.google.com>,
Raymond Yohros <bat@birdband.net> wrote:
>i dont think there's too much to learn from mercury
>other than verifing that its an empty heavy moonlike place.

Not so. Notably, its *origin* is a considerable mystery, which might shed
significant light on the early evolution of the solar system.

Moreover, even on general principles, such predictions are grossly unsafe.

In 1960, it seemed a safe prediction that the lunar farside would look
much like the nearside. The first actual images made it clear that the
two sides are completely different, and we still don't really understand
why.

At the beginning of 1979, most planetary scientists thought they had a
reasonable idea of what to expect the Galilean satellites of Jupiter to
look like. Eight months later, those ideas had mostly gone down in
flames. Moreover, the revised ideas based on the Jupiter results went
down in flames *again* at Saturn and Uranus.

Before the launch of Compton, astrophysicists thought they had a fair
handle on gamma-ray bursts: they were some kind of eruption on neutron
stars not far away in the galaxy. Details were disputed, but not the
general picture. Then Compton's BATSE experiment started machine-gunning
those theories. Some of the bursts are unbelievably powerful explosions
in the distant universe, and others we just have no idea about. None, or
almost none, of them are nearby neutron stars.

A decade ago, people thought we had a reasonable general idea of how solar
systems formed and what extrasolar planets would be like. Then people
started actually finding them... and the earlier theories are in shambles,
and the theorists are struggling to make sense of gross weirdness like
"hot Jupiters".

A year ago, we thought we knew what we'd see when Stardust went past comet
Wild 2, based on previous images from comets Halley and Borrelly. The
Stardust images weren't even a major part of the mission -- the camera was
mostly for navigation. But the nucleus of Wild 2 is nothing like Halley's
or Borrelly's... 

-- 
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend."    |   Henry Spencer
                                -- George Herbert       | henry@spsystems.net

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