mercury

It's 10:30 in the am, and I am in the library at school between chem lecture and chem recitation. I was reading an article about today's scheduled flyby of mercury by the Messenger probe, that will send back 1200 images of mercury, the first images since the mid-1970's.

"It will take more than 1200 images during the flyby, providing views of the planet that were never seen by Mariner 10, which imaged only 45% of the surface. "The first thing that most of us want to see is what the other 55% of the surface looks like," says mission member Faith Vilas, director of the MMT Observatory in Arizona, US.



"The flyby will even offer views that will not be possible when it begins to orbit the planet in 2011. That's because the spacecraft will pass over the planet's equatorial regions during this and its subsequent Mercury flybys in October 2008 and September 2009. When it goes into orbit, however, it will fly over the polar regions and will thus not get the same close-up perspective from its flybys over the lower latitudes.



"All seven of its scientific instruments will be used during the flyby to try to understand why Mercury is such an "oddball", says Sean Solomon, the mission's principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the US."



At nasa's website, they have a summary of the mission, as well as countdown clocks. To my surprise, there's 25 minutes until the flyby. How cool is it that in the 21st century we can get up to the second updates of missions in space? There's even a countdown clock to when the probe will begin its orbit of Mercury in 2011.
I don't think that I should rule out astrobiology as something that I should aim for.

here's the site for the countdown clocks:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/