Mercury – MESSENGER

Venus – Venus Express

Earth – lots!! (Terra, Aqua & iridium frex among them)

&

Mars – Mars Express & Mars Odyssey – plus the rovers on the ground! (& more?)

That seems like something of an achievement – but also just a start.

Anyway, how long before the first great hi-res closeups land? I hear that the craft is in a high elliptical orbit & that the primary science phase will start in April, but don’t they need to adjust the orbit to a slightly lower one for precision imaging and/or stability, like they did with the MRO at Mars? And because Mercury doesn’t have any atmosphere to assist in braking, how long will this take? At Mars it took five months, so I can’t really say how long it’ll take here with thrusters only. Mercury is moving very fast though, so the relative speed of the probe to the planet may not make it an issue. But then again, I dunno the math

FINALLY!! Now we have another strange new world to explore . A place where human instruments have never been,

Well, not quite never but very rarely.

See Mariner 10 :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_10

which flew past the innermost planet twice back in 1974 – March 29th and Sept. 21st.

Then there’s the other recent MESSENGER fly-pasts which have ocurred at least a few times previously – see the links the BA has below the Opening article here.

Plus human telescopes incl. RADAR ones (Arecibo, I think) have mapped Mercury previously to some extent – although of course they haven’t physically been there.

Source for quotes # 15 – NASA MESENGER* press conference :

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html

MESSENGER elapsed mission time : 2,417 days, 19 hours 27 minutes 25 secs.

Time since insertion burn : 59 minutes now.

***

10:00 p.m. EDT (time) / (event) MESSENGER has become the first spacecraft to enter orbit about Mercury, our innermost planet.

Spaceprobe tweet : “MESSENGER2011 Now it’s time to start making some science! #MOI2011″ sent 15 seconds ago.

Same source as first link here.

****

For those who haven’t already seen it :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPprOO2u1gk&feature=player_embedded

This Youtube clip shows Mercury’s double sunrise phenomena & is worth watching.
Guess MESSENGER will be seeing this for real – as Mercury’s new satellite.

Off-topic but hopefully of interest too :

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/supermoon.html

NASA also has the Goddard cheif scientist discussing the “supermoon” bad astronomy myth.

* Sorry about the text “shouting”, can’t help it with acronymns!

Wow. Just Wow. We really are going, aren’t we?

“.. camera working just fine and spacecraft where it’s supposed to be. …All indications so far are that its been a perfect evening.”

Marvellous news.

The Mercurian feature called the “Spider” being renamed “Pantheon Fossae” tho’ ? Awwww, spoilsports. Still :

Congratulations to all the MESSENGER team involved in making this happen. Well done and thankyou.

When American astronomers worried that the election of a Marxist government under Salvador Allende in 1970 might threaten plans to build what would be the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere at the time — 158 inches in diameter — it was Dr. Blanco who was dispatched to explain to President Allende what the Americans were doing on his mountaintop.

And when President Allende was overthrown by a military junta and replaced by General Augusto Pinochet three years later amid death squads and disappearances, strikes and food shortages, Dr. Blanco was dispatched to General Pinochet, who decided that he wanted to visit the observatory and asked for a list of Chilean staff members and their political affiliations. Dr. Blanco demurred, saying that that would be an inappropriate intrusion into Chilean politics.

“General Pinochet visited Cerro Tololo anyway,” Dr. Blanco wrote in a summary of his life in The Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2001, “and we kept those Chilean staff members we knew to have been pro-Allende away.”

—Courageous guy, as well as an important contributor to science.

/threadhighjack

Victor Blanco, Stargazer, Dies at 92
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: March 16, 2011

Victor Blanco, a Puerto Rican astronomer who helped build a major outpost for American science, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and shepherded it through 14 years of revolution, counterrevolution and economic turmoil, died on March 8. He was 92 and lived in Vero Beach, Fla.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/science/space/17blanco.html?_r=1&ref=science

I can actually remember where I was (in a van, suffering from numbutt on an all-day drive to a friend of my Mom’s in beautiful BC) when I first heard of MESSENGER, which was a radio broadcast aired around the launch date. Much later, when I received my braces, I heard that I’d be getting them off in this month, birthing the hope that they’d be gone at roughly the same time MESSENGER arrives.

Alas, that was not to be…but WTH! Anyway, how long before the first Haleakala-class hi-res images land for the public to see?
And Phil, I still don’t get your fascination with a Hawaiian volcano.

Would “welcome home” be appropriate for MESSENGER?

And, not just 7 years, but almost 4.9 billion miles. (The MESSENGER website currently says it’s about 4,899,563,022 miles, and going up 61 miles a second.)