Mercury Flyby 1 Options

[ustrax]

Bigger and bigger!...

MERCURY FLYBY1 PARTY at spacEurope!

Feel free to join in and participate!

[ugordan]

Wow, that last image really shows detail. Looks like they deconvolved it already, unlike the last 4 shots. It doesn't show any blur anymore. MDIS cameras may not be awesome cameras in terms of resolution, but they sure produce nice, sharp images.

[Stu]

To any of the MESSENGER team lurking out there... GOOD LUCK for later today!

"Waiting..."

[NMRguy]

Details, indeed! There's no question that we're finally bearing down on the first planet. Today is the big day--just 7 hours to go before closest approach.

But it is nice to see such details when the craft is still 760,000 km from the planet. I'm really looking forward to the other side where the NAC Mosaics will be taken from distances ~120 and ~66 times closer. Very exciting times.

[gndonald]

Getting closer. This one really shows quite a bit of detail. Particularly clear near the terminator is the multi-ring basin Vivaldi:

And what better way to celebrate this magnificent achievement than by listening to "Summer" from the 'Four Seasons'.

But seriously as someone who was less than one when Mariner 10 flew past Mercury for the first time and just over that age when it flew-by for the last time, I feel that this mission was well overdue... Here's wishing it the best of luck and may it exceed all the planners expectations now that it has reached it's goal.

[Pedro_Sondas]

I am seeing numerous news reports that 700 GBytes of data will be returned by MESSENGER over the next 2 days. This, being an absurd value for reasons too numerous to count, is obviously a result of a bits/bytes or order of magnitude error. So what is the real amount that will be sent back over this flyby? I see that there are 2 banks of 8 Gbit solid state memory, the amount of data sent back on the Venus flyby was 6 GBITS at 600 images and there should be double that number on the Mercury flyby, the average bitrate at Mercury is 18 Kbit/s and the expected data return for 1 year after orbit insertion is only 135 Gbits................. an obvious actual value for this flyby is not jumping out at me....

MESSENGER Mission News
January 11, 2008

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/stat...t_01_11_08.html

“The entire instrumentation suite will be operating during this flyby, taking more than 1,200 images and gathering other scientific observations, filling the on-board data recorder with more than 700 megabytes of history-making measurements, within a period of 55 hours,” said MESSENGER Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.

[Ant103]

A version of this latest image, magnified by 2, sharpened :

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[Thu]

So thrilling, the images just keep coming, bigger and bigger every hours and I just cannot wait to see the C/A images

I have a quick question here, there's a small "ring" around Mercury images - it is the image compression artifact, isn't it?

[mhall]

There was some chat a few days ago, regarding the relatively inefficient camera coverage - the NAC, in particular, sometimes takes a frame of the night-side, or even empty space.

Well, I was just watching the Visualisation Tool on the JHUAPL site, and I'm pretty sure that the approach NAC frames happens to include an image of the Earth, just before it went behind Mercury. It'll be a single pixel, of course, but it will be a nice additional feature to point out on the mosaic.

-- Martin

[djellison]

WOooooosh

Time Until Closest Approach: 00:00:08 (hh:mm:ss)
Altitude: 201 km (125 mi)
Visible Surface Sunlit: 0.0%
NAC Resolution At Image Center: 7.74 m/pixel
WAC Resolution At Image Center: 54.18 m/pixel
Surface Coordinates At Sensor Center: 3.62 º S 31.54 º E

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Lets hope everything worked as planned. can't wait to see the images.

[elakdawalla]

They made a video of the approach images, including four frames not previously posted.

I made an animated GIF version, much faster to download.

--Emily

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[kenny]

If you're not doing so already, this is worth following right now. It refreshes every 30 secs...

Messenger encounter visualisation

[ustrax]

Signal reacquired!

According to Noam Izenberg: "Closest approach has come and gone, spacecraft signal reacquired and radio science has lock. MASCS is taking surface data, MDIS is imaging, the laser has completed its ground track, and other instruments have all been active. Everything looks great so far!"

[jsheff]

Bigger and bigger!...

MERCURY FLYBY1 PARTY at spacEurope!

Feel free to join in and participate!

That's a nice site, Rui.

Is there any live TV or web coverage of the scenes in the control room at Johns Hopkins? There doesn't seem to be anything on NASA TV; what a wasted opportunity!

- John Sheff
Cambridge, MA