Word: mercurians
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MESSENGER will study these and other Mercurian curiosities when it arrives at the planet in 2011. Completing a full orbit in 12 hours and swooping as close as 124 miles to the surface, it will need just six months to photograph the entire globe. After a three-decade wait for a return visit, that ought to seem like no time at all. --By Jeffrey Kluger...
...have caught our first glimpses of the ammonia clouds and great storm systems of Jupiter; the cold, salt-covered surface of the moon; and desolate crater-pocked, ancient and broiling Mercurian wasteland; and the wild and eerie landscape of our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus...
...Under the best viewing conditions, it never appears as more than a hazy disk in earth-bound telescopes. Last week, as the Mariner 10 passed only 400 miles from the planet, some of the mystery about Mercury was finally dispelled. Radioing back the first close-up pictures of the Mercurian surface, the robot ship unveiled a bleak, cratered and totally forbidding world...
...dense. Traveling in a lopsided orbit, it comes as close to the sun as 29 million miles, then sweeps as far away as 43 million miles. To anyone standing on Mercury's surface, the sun would seem to stand still at times, then move backward briefly, in the Mercurian sky. Another oddity: Mercury's trip around the sun takes 88 earth days; yet it rotates on its axis only once every 176 earth days-a fact first discovered in 1965 by earth-based radar. Thus Mercury's "day" is twice as long as its year...
...Recently, radar astronomers suggested that Mercury has mountains as high as 4,000 ft., rolling hills and valleys, and some lunar-like craters, some of them perhaps of volcanic origin. Surface temperatures are far more extreme than those on either the moon or Mars. At the height of the Mercurian day, they may reach 940° F., more than enough to melt lead. At night they plunge to - 350° F. No living things could be expected to endure such a harsh climate; yet scientists do not entirely dismiss the possibility of some day finding evidence that water-or even...