MESSENGER ARRIVES, Mercury Orbit Insertion Options

[Astro0]

Less than 20 hours now until the MESSENGER spacecraft fires its engine to enter orbit at Mercury.

Live Webcast March 17th – broadcast starts at 0030 UTC.

Follow the progress: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/mer_orbit.html.
There will be commentary on the mission, real-time coverage of the maneuver, animation of what the spacecraft is doing, a view of the carrier’s Doppler as they receive it, and live video from MESSENGER Mission Operations.

Remember that the Canberra DSN is providing two-way communication with MESSENGER
We'll be using both DSS43 (70-metre) and DSS34 (34-metre) antennas.

Good luck to the team at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

[tanjent]

Dang, I still can't access jhuapl and a number of other U.S. sites from here in Taiwan. Does anyone else have a similar problem? The Cassini site is also inaccessible to me most of the time recently. I complained to my ISP and they actually blamed it on the Japan earthquake - but tracert indicates the problem is somewhere in the U.S. I thought the Internet was designed to be robust in the face of point blockages whatever the cause. Anyway I hope there will be plenty of secondary renderings springing up on this thread and elsewhere, before the "oohs" and "aahs" drive me nuts! Thanks Hugh, for your offering in 93 - spectacular.