Or, Not Everything’s For Sale

As you might have noticed, this blog is not heavily studded with ads. Oh, sure, I have some links over in my left sidebar for Amazon, my CafePress T-shirt shop, and space music by GEODESIUM. I put them there to encourage people to buy stuff through my site when they go to Amazon, or if they need cool, space-themed gifts for themselves or others.  In return, Amazon.com gives me a few gold-pressed latinum nuggets each time somebody clicks through and buys stuff, but those nuggets are not added to the price you pay. They’re just part of Amazon’s cost of “renting” my web page for a link to theirs.  That makes me a sort of sales agent, a conduit, for which I get a little reward.  CafePress gives me a portion of T-shirt sales, and of course, I’m married to the guy who does those lovely GEODESIUM albums, so I get a reward there, too (although not gold-pressed latinum).

Those little rewards add up and I use them to pay the bills to my ISP.  So, if you’re inclined to buy something anyway, do us both a favor and use those clickables to do it.

I also have an online store, accessible up there where it says “The Spacewriter’s Store.” It’s a place where I can  recommend books and products that I personally have read or used, or that I’d like to read or use.  It’s amazingly easy for me to add stuff to the online store, which is what attracted me to it in the first place. I don’t have a lot of time to spend futzing around with code.

Astute observers will notice that I have another “gift shop” listed on my main web page, and it’s an outgrowth of a online “library” I once started. It also has links to specific products on Amazon. I tried to make those part of a review process to help readers make some choices in their buying.

So, I was giving some thought to “monetizing” my blog even more, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to festoon it with more ads. I think most readers appreciate that. I know that I can’t stand looking at blogs that have more ads than copy.  I do have an account with Adsense, but I’ve mainly used that to put ads on my other web pages. I used to have revolving ads on my other blog, and every day — EVERY day — I’d have to go in and weed out some ads that were just not appropriate for the content I write about. No, they weren’t for pr0N or anything like that. Usually they were for what my friend Phil Plait likes to call “woo-woo” theories of the universe written up in books that are in bad need of editorial oversight. And, I got a little tired of having ads pop up from anti-science zealots; they looked really stupid on a site about science, and worse yet, I felt responsible about those ads.

So, for the time being, I have no Adsense ads on this page.  And, maybe that’s okay.  Not everything has to be monetized up the wazoo.

Mercury Continues to Surprise People

I’ve been reading up on the Mercury MESSENGER mission lately. Its findings are fascinating because they seem to refute the old “Mercury’s a dead planet” meme that was popular in planetary science circles for a while. MESSENGER’s measurements of Mercury’s magnetic field, for example, show that there is a dipole field (meaning it has north and south poles), and that it’s still being generated by a dynamo deep inside the planet.

In addition, images of the planet show that it was quite the poppin’ place back in the early days of the solar system. Its geologic history is much more complex than anybody thought, and it includes episodes of volcanic eruptions, particularly around the huge Caloris Basin impact crater site. Here’s what planetary scientist Jim Head had to say about Mercury’s turbulent past:

“By combining Mariner 10 [which first imaged and studied Mercury] and MESSENGER data, the science team was able to reconstruct a comprehensive geologic history of the entire basin interior,” explained James Head of Brown University, the lead author of one of several reports that were published earlier this summer in the journal Science. “The Caloris basin was formed from an impact by an asteroid or comet during the heavy bombardment period in the first billion years of Solar System history. As with the lunar maria, a period of volcanic activity produced lava flows that filled the basin interior. This volcanism produced the comparatively light, red material of the interior plains intermingled with impact crater deposits. Subsidence caused the surface of the Caloris floor to shorten, producing what we call wrinkle-ridges. The large troughs, or graben, then formed as a result of later uplift, and more recent impacts yielded newer craters.”

What I personally find fascinating are the volcanic vents that MESSENGER has imaged. This figure shows a mosaic of images taken of the largest volcano yet found on Mercury. The sketch map below identifies the major features in the image. The “irregularly-shaped depressions” probably correspond to volcanic vents. The “margin of the dome-like feature” shows the outer limits of lava flows from the vents. Those flows probably covered up the underlying surface of “hummocky plains” that existed earlier. The unlabeled double line outlines bright material associated with the volcano. That material could be pyroclastic deposits ejected during volcanic eruptions at the vents.

The “highly-embayed impact crater” seems to have had lava flow up to its rim; a more distant impact crater is “relatively fresh” and unchanged by any lava. (”Relatively fresh” means that it hasn’t been cratered over, and is younger than the surrounding terrain.) The volcano is located just inside the rim of the Caloris impact basin, labeled as “Caloris basin rim units” on this map.

This map (Credit: Figure 1 from Head et al., Science, 321, 69-72, 2008) and many others are what planetary scientists are using to understand the processes that have shaped Mercury since its formation.

Real-time Updates

Okay, so I must be the last one in the cosmos to realize that several of NASA’s missions are Twittering to interested fans here on Earth. I heard about it somewhere, so I went out and got a Twitter account so I could get these updates from the Hubble mission crew, the Mars landers, and some future missions to the Moon. I have a few other Twitterers I’m following, and I’m sure there’ll be more.

Today I learned that LRO_NASA is working on some data acquisition and getting ready for some rehearsal for their mission(s). NewHorizons2015, which is on the way to the outer solar system (Pluto territory) gave me some background about Pluto’s atmosphere and geology.

And, of course, I’ve let the world (or at least the few people who are following me (I’m spacewriter on there, very imaginative, I know)) know what I’m doing.  You can follow my rather infrequent Twitters if you like, but I suggest you go check out some of the NASA Twitters; go to Twitter and search for NASA.  All kinds of cool stuff comes up — stick to the ones that are actually at NASA and you’ll have more Twitters than you know what to do with!