Mercury as we've never seen it before

1/16/2008 10:32:00 pm / The truth was spoken by Rich /

Holy planets Batman! This is amazing. The Messenger Probe (aaah, I see what you've done there with the name) has beamed back some piccies of the side of Mercury the Mariner Probe missed in the 70's, which was the last time they spent 400 billion bucks on a flying camera in order to take pictures of something they could have seen for $5 just by purchasing the Junior Encyclopedia of space. Here it is look:

Amazing eh? It's been well worth it. All those genius science dudes toiling away for hours and hours and years and years spending billions and billions of dollary-doos to build something that can transverse the universe and here's the fruits of their labour. Incredible, amazing, fascinating.

If there's one minor criticism though of the whole project, which probably cost the same as a few hundred hospitals and required a collective genius that could have cured all diseases and probably even death in the same time - my one tiny criticism, is that the side of Mercury this thing has photographed, the side these science boffins were so desperate to see, does look quite a lot like the other fucking side, so I'm not entirely convinced these pictures represent value for money.

4 comments:

Comment by Alan on 17 January 2008 at 06:45

The cynics amongst us might even suggest that the bottom picture IS the the top picture... just 'mirrored' & 'flipped' in photoshop! (But then perhaps that was your point?)

Comment by Rich on 17 January 2008 at 11:44

Exactament, it isn't but it might as well be.

Comment by Alan on 17 January 2008 at 14:54

I think you'll find it is... I wasn't suggesting that you had done it, but try it. I did and you end up with exactly the same picture, barring the brightness/contrast. If the 1st pic really is from an old publication and the 2nd pic really is a recent pic of the other side - then Mars is a very symmetrical planet!!

Comment by Rich on 17 January 2008 at 19:14

Groan...it's Mercury not Mars. Both pictures were just randomly selected from Google images, they might not even be Mercury for all I know, it was joke that has now been killed stone dead.

Post a Comment