A quickie: the MESSENGER spacecraft is on its way to Mercury, and to get there it has to do a series of complicated maneuvers, including flying past Venus.
The first of those maneuvers has just been completed, and Emily from the Planetary Society blog reports that all is well. That’s great news! Of course, there are four more such maneuvers to do, and 5 frakking years to wait before it gets to Mercury, but hey, like the man said to Ellie Arroway, "small steps".
Oh– I just got a call, and it looks like I’ll be on Coast to Coast AM tonight around 10:00 Pacific time to talk about NASA and Hubble. I’ll blog about that a bit later when I have time.
October 24th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
“5 frakking years”
OH YEAH!
“they look like us; there are many copies”
hehehe
October 24th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
Are there going to be any images of the Venus encounter? I’d be curious to see their preformance at that planet (I know they did good for Earth).
So, Mercury itself is the next stop for manuevers? Wonder if that’ll give us a preview of the actual mission.
This is SO cool; STEREO going up Wendsday, GLAST getting an October launch in 2007, and MESSENGER doing fine on it’s way to the Iron planet.
October 24th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
There won’t be any images because the spacecraft was behind the sun at the time making communication nearly impossible. They didn’t want to make the encounter more difficult than absolutely necessary because they couldn’t fix anything that went wrong. Drat. NEXT time, there will be pictures.
October 24th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
I loved contact. My favorite movie of all time.
So, I must correct you, Phil. It was “Small moves, Ellie.”
October 25th, 2006 at 1:33 am
BA wrote: “…there are four more such maneuvers to do, and 5 frakking years to wait before it gets to Mercury…”
Gosh, Jim Kirk would just hit impulse drive and the Enterprise would hop from Venus to Mercury in 3 minutes…oh…um…I forgot, this is a real spacecraft! (;
October 25th, 2006 at 7:58 am
So, how’s the research going on high thrust, plasma rockets? When do we get going with some REAL space ships. Better living thru chemistry is cool, but I keep waiting for NUKES IN SPACE. AKA Phoenix, etc.
Gary 7
October 26th, 2006 at 2:10 am
But Mr Ansorge, don’t you know, nukes are BAD! (As are carbohydrates in food, mercury in vaccines, and any hint of critical thought.) We can’t have BAD things in space!
Life is so much simpler if you can just divide everything into good vs. bad, black vs. white. Who needs all that grey of complexity, anyway?
Am I rambling off topic? Sorry.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:57 am
That’s it, I’m leaving!
October 27th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
BA you’re the boy who can’t wait for christmas or Mercury. But I have good news, orbital insertion is indeed 5 freaking years away but sort of like a trailer to a hot and well lit movie a slew of Mercury flybys will occur prior to insertion the first one in Jan 2008 which is a mere 15 months away.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/trajectory.html
June 5th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
[...] Just as it did last October, the MESSENGER spacecraft on its way to the planet Mercury is about to get a gravitational assist from Venus today. [...]