Mercury may look cold, but it's actually very hot.

It has already provided NASA with great fly-by images of Earth, Venus, and Mercury, but now NASA’s latest space probe, Messenger, has settled in for its permanent assignment.  Messenger has entered the orbit of Mercury, and now it is beaming back the first of an estimated 75,000 images of the planet-comet Mercury.  It’s the most exhaustive photo survey of Mercury ever undertaken, and the first Mercury image captured by Messenger is hitting media outlets.  Mercury the car may be gone, but Mercury the planet is being studied harder than ever!

Messenger, like NASA itself, is actually an acronym.  Messenger is short for “MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging,” which is a horrible thing to call a spaceship, but for me the real sin is the use of double letters in mercury, environment, and geochemistry for inclusion into the space probe’s name.  I know you want a cool name for your spacecraft, but you’re really stretching it, because what Messenger stands for doesn’t even make sense.  You just added “ranging” onto the end to make it Messenger!

Tags: Mercury, image of Mercury, NASA, MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, NASA Messenger spacecraft, Messenger, Messenger spacecraft captures images of Mercury, Mercury images, first images of Mercury taken from orbit, space, images of space, pictures of planets, astronomy

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