Mercury, MESSENGER, solar system exploration

The Case of the Lobate Scarps

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A Noir Look at Mercury’s
Mysterious Surface Evolution

Mercury’s horizon, as seen by the MESSENGER mission.

The name’s Basin, Caloris Basin, and I’m a planetary science detective. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. Of all the planets in all the solar systems in the cosmos, I’m interested in Mercury. It’s a classy place, with a great surface to boot.

So, until just a couple of days ago, things weren’t going too well for me. I’d been stonewalled with a lack of knowledge about ALL of Mercury’s surface. It was tough, and I was down to my last… well, let me tell you the whole story.

It was late on a Friday afternoon in mid-January. Business was slow. It had been for years, ever since the Cassini mission had launched, followed by New Horizons. Everybody’s attention was turned toward the outer solar system, or near-Earth asteroids, or dwarf planets beyond Neptune.

And, it seems that ever since I’d cracked the case of the sulfuric plumes in the Venusian atmosphere, inner-solar-system detective work had just dried up. Pancake eruptions on Venus were so last-century. Even Martian dust storms weren’t getting as much press as they used to. Oh, sure, the occasional asteroid-impact threat on Earth raised a little stir now and again, but in the main, it seemed like nobody cared about the inner planets any more. A pity.

I mean, there was Mercury, waiting to be explored again. Even though Mariner had given it a quick look back in the 1970s, its glory days weren’t over. Not by a long shot! Sure, its surface would be at home on a black-and-white scene from a 1940s detective movie set (without the rain and fog, though). And sure, it’s a bear to observe from Earth. But, Mercury’s got as many mysteries as those outer planets, and it’s a darned sight more rocky!

Still, all the hot researchers and their grants (and grad students) were out there at Saturn, and using Hubble and ground-based telescopes to poke around Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. They were flush with success, invoking cryovolcanism right and left to explain what they were finding! Yet, for my NSF grant money, there was a lot of good science to be done in the inner solar system. So, I resigned myself to having to wait for a while. I knew that soon I’d eventually have my day in (or actually near) the Sun. Continue reading The Case of the Lobate Scarps →

Mars

The Quest for Mars

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Mars Again… and Again

Mars Rover Spirit Looks Out Over a Low Plateau

Mark and I just announced the fulldome incarnation of our long-popular show MarsQuest—something that’s been a long time coming. The show itself has had several incarnations, beginning in 1988 when we created a show about Mars called “The Mars Show” and it was basically a slide show with a soundtrack. (Why that title? We could never think of a better one, so it kept that name for quite a while.)

In 1996, we got together with a group of people at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to talk with them about a traveling exhibition they were creating called MarsQuest. They wanted a planetarium show, and by golly, here we were with a planetarium show that we wanted to update. After a few meetings, we had a deal, and the rest, as they say, is history. The MarsQuest exhibition has finished its run around the country and is retired to a museum in Florida. But, MarsQuest the planetarium fulldome show is still very much alive and kicking, bringing info about the Red Planet to all and sundry.

It seems that I write about Mars every few years, and people often ask why. It’s simple: I’ve always been taken with the Red Planet. It all goes back to a game we used to play when I was a kid, about exploring Mars. And that’s part of it. As I got older, I read more about the planet, especially when in 1976 we actually landed a spacecraft there.

So, it was only natural that I’d eventually end up writing a documentary script about it. And revisiting it as more spacecraft send back more images and data about this planet. Not only did the game from my childhood spurred MarsQuest, and a scene in SkyQuest, a show we did for the National Air and Space Museum’s planetarium. So the game I played keeps coming back in one form or another.

And it continues. As more Mars images and data come in, I continue to work on other Mars-related presentations. For me, this dry and dusty desert planet is also one of the most tantalizing places in the solar system, and if I were of the right generation, a place I could have once considered exploring in first person.

Exploring Science and the Cosmos

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