Oh, What A Relief!

So I'm over at the Bad Astronomy blog last night and there's a post about the MESSENGER space craft which has begun returning photos of Mercury (Related subject: A recent NASA probe recently returned this gem of an image from Uranus). Well, there's nothing I enjoy more than surfing the internets and making intellectually stimulating comments on other people's sites. So that's why I left this little gem behind:

"I heard a rumor that Messenger was actually supposed to probe Venus but ended up at Mercury because of an English to metric conversion mistake by NASA."

I was quite proud of it, and I'm glad to report that the comment did not go unappreciated. Someone named Gary F. even took the time to straighten me out:

"That sounds pretty unlikely, it would be more likely to just fly off into space and be lost. MESSENGER (the acronym refers to Hermes/Mercury, the messenger of the gods) was designed to go to Mercury. You may be thinking of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was lost because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while NASA used metric."

It's a relief to know that someone is FINALLY taking me seriously!!