{"id":28,"date":"2008-02-09T13:45:30","date_gmt":"2008-02-09T18:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2008\/02\/09\/mercury\/"},"modified":"2008-02-09T13:45:30","modified_gmt":"2008-02-09T18:45:30","slug":"mercury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2008\/02\/09\/mercury\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercury"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve enjoyed seeing the pictures of Mercury from the  MESSENGER flyby.  (If you haven&#8217;t already seen it, you should definitely check out pictures of <a href=\"http:\/\/messenger.jhuapl.edu\/gallery\/sciencePhotos\/image.php?page=2&amp;gallery_id=2&amp;image_id=144&amp;keyword=3&amp;search_cat=\">the spider<\/a>.)   So far, the news accounts don&#8217;t seem to do a very good job explaining the scientific importance of the results.  <a href=\"http:\/\/planetary.org\/news\/2008\/0130_MESSENGERs_First_Mercury_Flyby_Reveals.html\">Here&#8217;<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/planetary.org\/news\/2008\/0130_MESSENGERs_First_Mercury_Flyby_Reveals.html\">s an article<\/a> that gives quite a bit more detail about the sorts of questions that can be addressed with these data.<\/p>\n<p>At this stage, not surprisingly, the data have raised a lot more questions than they&#8217;ve answered.  It&#8217;ll be a lot of fun to see what comes out of the rest of the mission.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, here&#8217;s a nice introductory physics puzzle: Why is it hard to get to Mercury?  Obviously, it takes a lot of energy to get to the outer planets, since you have to go &#8220;uphill&#8221; against the Sun&#8217;s gravity.  But Mercury&#8217;s dowhill from us, so it ought to be easy to get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve enjoyed seeing the pictures of Mercury from the MESSENGER flyby. (If you haven&#8217;t already seen it, you should definitely check out pictures of the spider.) So far, the news accounts don&#8217;t seem to do a very good job explaining the scientific importance of the results. Here&#8217;s an article that gives quite a bit more &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2008\/02\/09\/mercury\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Mercury<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}