Mercury And Barney

NASA's Messenger spacecraft began orbiting Mercury on March 17, and will remain here for another year or so taking photographs and measurements. The Messenger arrived at its final destination after a 6.5-year loop the loop through the inner solar system. A 15-minute engine burn slowed the spacecraft sufficiently for it to be captured by Mercury’s gravity. By design, the Messenger circles around the planet on a highly elliptical orbit, dipping down as close to 160 miles to Mercury’s surface and rising as far up as 9,300 miles.

Says mission chief scientist Sean Solomon: "Mercury has had an exposed surface for at least 3.5 to 4 billion years and some of those surfaces are extremely cratered to the point where there are so many craters they start to obscure one another."

My genius friend Barney, who sold his search company to Microsoft and now the chief architect for Bing local search, tells me he is"moonlighting" as co-founder and CTO of Moon Express which is building an autonomous robotic lunar lander to support exploration and resource development on the moon (Think: mining platinum from the asteroids that impacted the moon). The company is now 8 FTE and has contracts with NASA.

Since Barney's bio on the web, here is a relevant interesting paragraph paragraph on Barney:

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From 1993-1998, Dr. Pell worked as a Principal Investigator and Senior Computer Scientist at NASA Ames, where he conducted advanced research and development of autonomous control software for NASA's deep space missions. Dr. Pell was the Architect for the Remote Agent and the Project Lead for the Executive component of the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX), the first intelligent executive to fly onboard and control a spacecraft (the Deep Space One mission). Remote Agent is widely considered one of the top achievements in the history of Artificial Intelligence and was awarded NASA's "software of the year" award in 1999. Dr. Pell was also Co-Lead for the Autonomy Integrated Product Development Team for NASA's New Millennium Program, responsible for planning and managing technology maturation and demonstration of autonomous systems technology for future use by NASA."