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Hi, I'm Kyle. I am a mentor student at Centennial High School. I mentor with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Mini Baja team at UMBC. Mini Baja is an intercollegiate design competition where teams from around the country design, fabricate, test, and race off-road vehicles in a series of competitions.
For more information, check out: http://students.sae.org/competitions/bajasae/
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
1. Pegah Pashai
hey kyle! in response to your comment..
the reason for naming craters is so that scientists can refer to the crater with a name, rather than "unnamed crater a," for example. That's the reason why they're naming craters they think are interesting (features) or important (big impact), because they want to get the ones that they believe will be most referred to named! They're going to try to name most of them gradually though, and that will take a LOT of names. The reason craters on Mercury have to be artists that were famous and are dead is b/c of the IAU-they make these rules for distinguishing/orderly factors I guess.
As far as dating of the planets, that's actually one of the first questions I asked my mentor. They can't like just look at the picture and run some type of scan or anything and figure out how old the crater is. But, they do know that its been a long long long time since anything has occurred on Mercury (volcanism, impact craters, etc.). So that helps in a way. They can also look at the surrounding area and see if there are othere craters/features and try to deduct age from there. But almost relative age not a real number. Think of it this way: if theres a messy desk with a lot of books on it, you know the book on top has been there for a lesser amount of time than a book way on the bottom of the pile. Book = crater, desk = Mercury!
And lastly for naming the craters there's actually an approved list of artist names I can use, and I'm naming 11 craters. But some names I chose include T.S. Eliot, Kipling, and Picasso!! As a community people try and propose the more important names to the more important craters. Or relate them. One of the biggest craters on the planet is named Hokusai because of the painting of the big wave (google it!), and I find that clever because the crater leaves huge radar lines across the planet.
01/15/10, 04:35 am