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.

[cndwrld]

I was going to show a plot of our VEX data downlink, which would show how much was stored in the on-board buffers and when it is dumped. But I can't figure out how to post an image.

But the VEX Virtis instrument data (the imaging spectrometer) won't be totally down (worst case) until 19 June (but may be down a couple days before that); all the other instruments should be down now.

I hear that all the Messenger data is down now. Reports are that the closest approach was within 5 Km of the target, which is great.

For VEX, we've been regularly analyzing data for a while now. Even so, it may not be trivial to process what the instrument teams have, because it was taken in a segment of the orbit where we've never taken data before. For Messenger, they are going to have to figure out what they have, and it may take a while for them to figure out what it is they are seeing. Some of the instruments are designed to work with rocks, not clouds. Shining a laser altimeter at clouds might make for messy data if you haven't seen it before.

ESA is planning a web site update on the fly-by within two or three weeks. I think the hope is that it will include a couple Messenger images. Keep in mind that the Messenger team will want to publish papers on the fly-by. If they release something now, it may be considered 'published' and journals won't accept papers on it. So they can't put out very much, or they risk running into trouble with editors.

Hope that helps.

[dvandorn]

Keep in mind that the Messenger team will want to publish papers on the fly-by. If they release something now, it may be considered 'published' and journals won't accept papers on it. So they can't put out very much, or they risk running into trouble with editors.

Now, that is an extraordinary statement. I know that I, for one, have *never* heard of any such problem plaguing the various researchers working with the MER or Cassini images (which are released as soon as they are received). I can understand that the various non-imaging instruments may take some time to process and interpret, but images? Especially jpegs of the images?

If it is truly the case that anyone on ANY research team working with planetary probes feel they must sequester ALL of their images until they have a chance to publish, then we (the taxpayers who are PAYING for their precious probes, often also paying their salaries) ought to put pressure on our representatives to force at least limited release of imagery as close to real-time as possible. Playing the game of "Oh, my editors might give me hassles if anyone sees any of these images before we publish" is just plain unacceptable in this day and age. Period.

-the other Doug