Probe spots Mercury's curious tail

[n2doc]

Boston University - CSP
This image of Mercury's tail was obtained by combining a full day's worth of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a type of overexposure that causes Mercury to appear much larger than actual size.



Alan Boyle writes: Comets aren't the only solar system objects that can grow a tail: NASA's STEREO mission has spotted a tail of faintly glowing gas stretching out from the planet Mercury. Now scientists are trying to figure out exactly what's in that thing.

Astronomers have known for some time that Mercury has some characteristics in common with comets, even though the composition of the closest-in planet is dramatically different from that of the dirty snowballs that ramble through our solar system's icy outer reaches. Mercury is surrounded by an exceedingly thin "coma" of gas, and radiation from the sun pushes a tail of atoms from that coma outward for more than a million miles.

The two satellites involved in the STEREO mission are designed to observe the sun's escaping atmosphere from positions in Earth's orbit that track ahead and behind our planet. Ian Musgrave, an Australian medical researcher who's also interested in astronomy, happened to be sifting through the online database of STEREO's imagery — and noticed that those images also recorded emissions from the Mercurial tail.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/09/22/5158248-probe-spots-mercurys-curious-tail

[FSogol]

1. Uh oh! Chemtrails on Mercury

:scared:




(Sarcasm aside, thanks for the post.)