Hot then cold, ready for your close up, Mr Mercury

He's really hot, really cold, maybe even a bit icy. He is the planet Mercury and this month he is ready for his extended close-up.

On Wednesday, NASA showed the first pictures taken by its Mercury Messenger spacecraft, which entered the planet's orbit on March 17.

Messenger will spend at least a year photographing, measuring and studying Mercury, which for now is the last frontier of planetary exploration.
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''This is the last of the classical planets, the planets known to the astronomers of Egypt and Greece and Rome and the Far East,'' the principal investigator, Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said.

It ''captivated the imagination and the attention of astronomers for millennia'', Dr Solomon said, but science had never had such a front-row seat. ''We're there now.''

The space agency has sent orbiters to five planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - but it probably will take a decade or two before a spacecraft orbits Uranus or Neptune. (In 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will zoom past Pluto - which is no longer regarded as a planet.)

Half a dozen fly-bys by NASA probes - three by Mariner 10 in the 1970s and three by Messenger in the past three years - have seen Mercury close up, though briefly.

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NASA Airborne Radar Set to Image Hawaiian Volcano

The Kilauea volcano that recently erupted on the Big Island of Hawaii will be the target for a NASA study to help scientists better understand processes occurring under Earth's surface. A NASA Gulfstream-III aircraft equipped with a synthetic aperture radar developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is scheduled to depart Sunday, April 3, from the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., to the Big Island for a nine-day mission.

The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, uses a technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar that sends pulses of microwave energy from the aircraft to the ground to detect and measure very subtle deformations in Earth's surface, such as those caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and glacier movements. As the Gulfstream-III flies at an altitude of about 12,500 meters (41,000 feet), the radar, located in a pod under the aircraft's belly, will collect data over Kilauea. The UAVSAR's first data acquisitions over this volcanic region took place in January 2010, when the radar flew over the volcano daily for a week. The UAVSAR detected deflation of Kilauea's caldera over one day, part of a series of deflation-inflation events observed at Kilauea as magma is pumped into the volcano's east rift zone.

The astronauts of planet Earth

In the 50 years since Yuri Gagarin first soared into space, 520 men and women have taken their own space odysseys. They have come from 38 countries, carried on American, Russian and, recently, Chinese vehicles. All have been proud to represent their nations. Now, in a special issue honouring their achievements, FT Weekend Magazine has interviewed an astronaut from 35 of these countries. The project involved 17 writers, 11 languages and a rather flustered mission control – but it resulted in stories as diverse and entertaining as the voyagers themselves. May we present … the astronauts of Planet Earth.

The human history of space began on the morning of April 12 1961. After a breakfast of meat paste and marmalade, squeezed from a tube, a 27-year-old lieutenant in the Soviet air force, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, was helped into a bulky orange flying suit. With his back-up, Gherman Titov, he was driven in a bus to a launch pad on the desolate Tyuratam missile-testing site on the steppes of Kazakhstan. According to Soviet lore, Gagarin then gave a short speech to the crowd of engineers, scientists and mechanics gathered in the early morning sunshine. “Dear friends,” he began. “What can I tell you in these last minutes before the launch? My whole life appears to me as one beautiful moment. All that I previously lived through and did, was lived through and done for the sake of this moment.”

Those words, written for Gagarin, had actually been recorded in Moscow. On the morning of his flight, he simply said goodbye, clanked helmets awkwardly with Titov, and was then taken up and strapped into a small spherical pod attached to a 300-tonne rocket that had been designed to carry nuclear weapons. For the next two hours, as the scientists fussed and took tranquilliser pills, Gagarin became slightly bored and asked for some music to be piped in. He said the first, true human words of a cosmonaut as his Vostok “satellite-ship” began to rise from the earth at 9.06.59am, his heart beating almost three times a second: “Let’s go!”

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