NASA has an undoubted talent for space flight. It also has one for awkward acronyms. A classic of the genre is MESSENGER, the name it has given to a probe currently orbiting Mercury. This is a contrived nod to that god’s role in the Roman pantheon, and stands (allegedly) for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging.
Mercury is the innermost of the solar system’s eight planets and was, until MESSENGER’s investigations, mysterious. Its only previous visitor was Mariner 10, another NASA probe, which made three fly-bys in the early 1970s. These revealed a world that looked like a hotter version of the Moon (which is only slightly smaller than Mercury), with a surface covered in craters scorched by the nearby sun.
Mariner 10’s visits threw up several puzzles. One was the presence of large escarpments (like the gash crossing the landscape in the picture) all over Mercury’s surface, which led researchers to speculate that the planet might be shrinking, causing its crust to shrivel like the skin of a dried orange. Another was that Mercury has a magnetic field. That was...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1OKI9Uk
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