marvelous new closeup images of Mercury by the same government which is waging the War in Iraq / help cure the USA's violent schizophrenia

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and some work and some don't.

The last time we got near-planet closeup snapshots of Mercury was from the NASA probe Mariner 10 in 1974.

This image was snapped yesterday during a flyby by the probe MESSENGER when it was about 156 Mercury diameters away. (Mercury's diameter is 4880 km.)

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) left Earth in 2004, but didn't go "straight" to Mercury. It is in the midst of a complicated series of planetary slingshot swing-bys -- two past Venus and one return pass near Earth -- to give it gravity speed boosts as well as a variety of scientifically interesting imaging and sensing targets.

When its complicated voyage through the inner Solar System is done, MESSENGER will insert itself into orbit around Mercury in 2011 and continue to image and sense the planet closest to the Sun. Mercury is so near the Sun that special care must be taken never to aim the optics or sensors toward the Sun, which would fry them -- as the Sun destroyed Icarus when he flew too near. For the same reason, the Hubble Space Telescope can't be used to photograph Mercury.

As a feat of robotic astrogation, this flyby is comparable to throwing a superball from Boston into a particular garbage can in San Francisco -- after bouncing it off El Paso, back for another bounce in Boston, then another bounce in El Paso. The orbit insertion will be an even more remarkable feat.

Robot voyaging in the inner Solar System -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars -- is near enough to Earth so that two-way radio signal time delays are short enough to let controllers on Earth make fine-tuning mid-course corrections. More distant voyages beyond Jupiter's orbit involve signal delays so lengthy that the latest generation of robot probes (e.g. Deep Space 1) must carry their own on-board astrogation hardware and software so they can make their own course corrections, and other critical decisions, without depending on commands from Earth. These robots have to think for themselves.

From Venus outward, the Solar System is Newtonian -- i.e., everything we can observe and every voyage we take is describable and computable according to Newton's Laws of time, space, gravity and motion as he wrote them in his "Principia." He drew heavily on, and acknowledged, the previous discoveries of Galileo and Kepler.

For cruising around Mercury, Newton isn't precise enough. The Sun's gravitational field is so massive and intense that time and space themselves are distorted in ways Newton's Laws cannot accurately account for.

By the 19th century, astronomers had verified that Mercury's elliptical orbit was not precessing as Newton said it should. The mystery of Mercury's disobedience was one of two 19th-century clues which forced physicists and mathematicians to find the deeply hidden flaws in Newton's scheme. Albert Einstein's Relativity (1905) gets most of the credit for solving the mystery of why Mercury wasn't where Newton said it should be.

It is very likely -- but this is just my profoundly ignorant guess -- that robot astrogation in Mercury's neighborhood must also take Relativistic effects into account. I'll see if I can bother an actual scientist associated with MESSENGER to see if that's true. It could also be that standard Newtonian astrogation is "close enough for government work" to place MESSENGER in the desired orbit, and they don't have to account for Relativity into their calculations.

But a trip to Mercury is no Walk In The Park and presents many unique challenges and dangers. Doubtless there are a lot of horseshoes and rabbits' feet and 4-leaf clovers in the pockets of the MESSENGER team.

Did you think I'd forget to add a few remarks about how wonderful I think this all is, for Human Beings and for the USA? How proud we should all be that we shot this camera to Mercury and the camera still works and we're getting the best snapshots we ever took of Mercury back at this very moment?

And how shitty I think the Iraq War is, for Human Beings and for the USA? To go back and forth between news about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, and news and images of Mercury from NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab -- it's like a violently incurable case of national schizophrenia, and it's worse today than when, in the middle of the Vietnam War, the USA landed human beings on the surface of the Moon, and brought them all home safe.

What on Earth will the USA be remembered for centuries and millennia from now? Will we be remembered as the Explorers of the Solar System and Beyond?

Or will the USA be remembered as those violent, crazy, dangerous people who scared the shit out of everybody in Asia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe?

You can help choose, you know. Look at these images. Contemplate them. Write your senators and your member of Congress. They really do read your e-mails; they're always sincerely terrified that you won't vote to re-elect them, and that their gravy train will end and they'll have to get a real job.

As of today, as we receive startling new images of Mercury in an endeavor in which no human or living creature was harmed in the slightest or intimidated or threatened or shamed or humiliated or insulted or turned into a homeless refugee, 3923 members of the U.S. military have been killed in combat in Iraq.

Now click on CNN or Fox or ABC, CBS or NBC news. What's their lead story on this day? What do they think the USA is doing right now that's important?

After the second or third Chevrolet and hemmorhoid cream commercial, they might show this new snapshot we just took of Mercury. Watch closely; it might be on your screen for three seconds if Britney Spears hasn't gone outside today.