blog.Jelmer Oosthoek.nl

I’ve been a fan of Freddy Mercury for a long time. His namesake the planet Mercury however never really interested me, but I guess this is about to change. A spacecraft from NASA called Messenger is on its way to Mercury. It had its first flyby earlier this year, with a second in October. The image below is a breathtaking oblique view of Mercury. You can see lots of craters, some recent bowl shaped and others older, filled by ancient volcanic outflow.

The image from Mercury above reminds me of the image below from Mars taken by the Viking orbiter in the 70’s.

So you can see, its really getting busy in our Solar System. We’re sending spacecraft to a lot of places these days. Mars is a big attraction (among others: Mars Express by ESA and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter by NASA) but Mercury is also popular: a second spacecraft, this time by ESA, called BepiColombo will fly to Mercury in 2013.

So what more attractions does the Solar System offer? Well, our Moon of course (missions by NASA, ESA, Japan, China, India and more), Venus (Venus Express by ESA) and the Saturn System, including the moon Titan (Cassini–Huygens by NASA/ESA/ASI).

Its so much data being delivered back to Earth, I’m really wondering if scientists all over the world have enough time/money/manpower to start analyzing the data. It really asks for automated intelligent data mining techniques. I just hope it will lead us to human spaceflight…