MESSENGER News Thread, news, updates and discussion Options

[paxdan]

Launched on August 3rd 2004, NASA's MESSENGER will become the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

News and updates are availbale via Johns Hopkins University MESSENGER website and the Kennedy Space Center's MESSENGER website.

There will be an earth flyby in August followed by a couple of swings by Venus and three velocity scrubbing passages past mecury before the craft enters orbit in March 2011.

April 18, 2005 status report from JHU. Extensive JHU FAQs page here.

[um3k]

I know you can get them from Earth, I meant pictures taken by a spacecraft.

[JRehling]

I know you can get them from Earth, I meant pictures taken by a spacecraft.

You can cover a box in foil and put a radio dish on it, place an amateur astronomer and a Celestron inside, and call it a spacecraft flying within 0.25 AU of Venus.

[um3k]

You can cover a box in foil and put a radio dish on it, place an amateur astronomer and a Celestron inside, and call it a spacecraft flying within 0.25 AU of Venus.

I mean a spacecraft...in space. Within a few thousand km of Venus (or however close Messenger is going to get).

[odave]

From the Messenger Website FAQ:

The Venus flybys provide important opportunities to calibrate MESSENGER’s instruments on the way to Mercury and make new scientific observations of Earth’s “sister planet.” The team plans to image the upper cloud layers at visible and near-infrared wavelengths for comparison with earlier spacecraft observations.

Since they're planning on imaging at visible wavelengths, and given the care they took to do that awesome movie from the Earth flyby, I'd assume we're going to see some kind of true color image releases...