MESSENGER News Thread, news, updates and discussion Options

[The Messenger]

The only problem with the timeline is that at orbital insertion, I will be as old and onry as Bruce

[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...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

"The only problem with the timeline is that at orbital insertion, I will be as old and ornery as Bruce."

No you won't. By then, I will be significantly older and much more ornery.

[dvandorn]

You don't need to be old to be ornery (though it helps). I'd say the orneriest person I ever met was Harlan Ellison, back in the late '70s when he was a rather young man. He was ornerier then than most people get to be in their advanced years...

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Let me add to my reputation for orneriness: if you ever see him again, tell him to get off his damned duff and either publish "The Last Dangerous Visions" or at least release the stories he acquired for it from now-dead authors. The very last stories by Edgar Pangborn and Tom Reamy have now been moldering in a box in his office for three straight decades, and I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few more stories there by authors who have since gone to their reward.

[edstrick]

Harlan Ellison: "The Mouth that Walks like a Man"

Being near Harlan is like the Ancient Chinese Curse: May You Live in Interesting Times.

Some of the LDV stories have been released and published, including a postumous collaboration between Cordwainer Smith and his wife, I believe.

[Bob Shaw]

Let me add to my reputation for orneriness: if you ever seen him again, tell him to get off his damned duff and either publish "The Last Dangerous Visions" or at least release the stories he acquired for it from now-dead authors.  The very last stories by Edgar Pangborn and Tom Reamy have now been moldering in a box in his office for three straight decades, and I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few more stories there by authors who have since gone to their reward.

Bruce:

Yup. The arrogance of the horrible wee big-head, and his terrible attitude to TLDV's contributors (many of whom are now, as you rightly say, ex-contributors), are beyond belief.

Bob Shaw

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

As I noted in the "Future Venus Missions" thread below, we now have a very detailed description of the science measurements that Messenger will make during its second Venus flyby in June 2007. (It won't make any during its first one because it's near solar conjunction.)
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/vexag/Nov2005/MESSENGER_VEXAG.pdf

Projected arrival data at Mercury for Bepi Colombo, by the way, is now 2017.

[Rakhir]

Messenger Status Report :
MESSENGER Team Prepares for December Deep Space Maneuver (DSM-1), when the craft’s large bipropellant thruster will be fired for the first time.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/stat...t_11_11_05.html

Rakhir

[antoniseb]

I saw that Messenger is currently closer to the Sun than Venus is. This is not unexpected, but I thought it was an interesting milestone.

[tedstryk]

Messenger Status Report :
MESSENGER Team Prepares for December Deep Space Maneuver (DSM-1), when the craft’s large bipropellant thruster will be fired for the first time.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/stat...t_11_11_05.html

Rakhir

I am a bit surprised, since I don't think it will be during the communications blackout, that they aren't taking Magnetometer and Energetic Particle and Plasma Spectrometer data, since that wouldn't require a large amount of bandwith or maneuvering.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

This is the very last component of Messenger that hasn't already been tried out. (Andy Dantzler said at the COMPLEX meeting that the craft has had a few software hiccups, but no hardware problems whatsoever so far.)

[tedstryk]

This is the very last component of Messenger that hasn't already been tried out.  (Andy Dantzler said at the COMPLEX meeting that the craft has had a few software hiccups, but no hardware problems whatsoever so far.)

What is "this" referring to? The instruments I spoke of or some earlier post?

[JRehling]

What is "this" referring to?  The instruments I spoke of or some earlier post?

The main thruster is apparently "this". It will be fired for the first time in this manuever. If "this" works, then we can have high expectations of a successful mission.

For no particular timely reason, I will re-voice the angst that it is so long between launch and any interesting science (even a Venus flyby)... If the earlier launch window had been hit, the mission would have been accelerated by *years*. The launch window that was used seems to have been about the worst one possible in terms of cruise duration.