MESSENGER News Thread, news, updates and discussion Options

[Littlebit]

]In the coming evenings, sky watchers can acquaint themselves with the MESSENGER spacecraft mission to Mercury. Late afternoon on Tuesday, June 5, 2007, MESSENGER will fly within about 210 miles (340 kilometers) of the surface of the planet Venus, and get a gravity kick toward its ultimate destination, the sun-baked planet Mercury.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu

[CAP-Team]

The quote above suggests that the spacecraft would actually be visible to observers..
Would be nice, but I don't think you can see the spacecraft passing Venus

[Holder of the Tw...]

Looking forward to "Mercury Flyby 1" on the web site countdown clocks in the next couple of days.

Here's wishing a successful Venus flyby with good science.

[RichardLeis]

I am not sure if this is planned, but I would love to see a flyby movie like the MESSENGER team created for the August 02, 2005 Earth flyby. I cannot stop playing that movie over and over again...

I was surprised during a recent search for Venus global views by how few there seemed to be. Maybe I am just missing the good ones. I am so excited to see Venus fill a MESSENGER camera view.

[elakdawalla]

I can confirm that the MDIS team does have an outbound movie planned to about 30 hours after closest approach. They'll be using 3 filters: one at 415 nm that should show the clouds pretty well, and two near-infrared wavelengths that they hope might get through to the surface (I have my doubts, but I can't fault them for trying; I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)

I have more details...later...after I get my story on the flyby posted tomorrow.

--Emily

[lyford]

I cannot stop playing that movie over and over again...

I agree, these videos are an extra benefit of these complicated multiple flyby gravity assist missions. After years of watching Star Trek, it's finally nice to really see the planets zoom by (albeit not in real time...)

I would like to see one of these movies start with the planet as a a point of light and zoom by until it fades to a point again.... some day!

[RichardLeis]

Thanks for the info, Emily. Looking forward to reading your report, and to the first images.

I would like to see one of these movies start with the planet as a a point of light and zoom by until it fades to a point again.... some day!

Yes, that would be great!

[edstrick]

"... was surprised during a recent search for Venus global views by how few there seemed to be. Maybe I am just missing the good ones..."

Few missions to Venus have done imaging. Mariner 10 was the first, Soviet Venera 9 and 10 orbiters took limited data, not full disk. Pioneer Venus Orbiter took extensive "Imaging Cloud Polarimeter" camera data including a lot of whole disk coverage but that's increasingly forgotten and may not be available, even from the NSSDC.. worth investigating. Galileo got some nice full disc images but a very limited amount. That's it, so far, besides Venus Express.

[tedstryk]

I have been told that they are slowly working to put the PVO clould photopolarimeter on CD-ROM, but that right now it is only available in extremely arcane formats.

[gndonald]

Looking forward to "Mercury Flyby 1" on the web site countdown clocks in the next couple of days.

Here's wishing a successful Venus flyby with good science.

I've just checked out the site and they seem to be showing both the 'Venus Flyby' and 'Mercury Flyby' captions with the clock showing the time to the Mercury flyby, hopefully there will be a site update soon.

[Littlebit]

That's it, so far, besides Venus Express.

Is the number of images released by the VE program still in the single digits?

[Greg Hullender]

I've just checked out the site and they seem to be showing both the 'Venus Flyby' and 'Mercury Flyby' captions with the clock showing the time to the Mercury flyby, hopefully there will be a site update soon.

Actually it still only shows the Venus flyby countdown; the other countdown is for Mercury Orbit Insertion, which is still a few years away. There will be a Mercury flyby in January 2008, and that's the countdown we're waiting for.

Another minor milestone -- Messenger should fly by Mercury's orbit in August. Mercury won't be there then, of course, but it's a cool event anyway.

--Greg

[JRehling]

I am not sure if this is planned, but I would love to see a flyby movie like the MESSENGER team created for the August 02, 2005 Earth flyby. I cannot stop playing that movie over and over again...

I was surprised during a recent search for Venus global views by how few there seemed to be. Maybe I am just missing the good ones. I am so excited to see Venus fill a MESSENGER camera view.

One of the better Venus images from spacecraft, lacking any facsimile of resolution, but having nice true color textures, is FROM Messenger already:

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/the_mission/pi...ch_venus_lg.jpg

I think one issue is that we "experientialists" like to see true color images, but they have little scientific value at Venus. For eye candy, I would like to see a movie in true color, but that would be a lot of bandwidth for eye candy alone. The UV/IR (if that's what the movie is limited to) will potentially interesting, but won't give me that feeling of looking out the window.

[volcanopele]

two near-infrared wavelengths that they hope might get through to the surface (I have my doubts, but I can't fault them for trying; I'm keeping my fingers crossed.)

At last year's LPSC, one of the members of the MESSENGER science team gave a preview of the Venus encounters. Now, it has been a while, but IIRC, they plan on imaging the surface by using one of their infrared filters to peer through one of the NIR windows and ratio those products with data from another NIR filter that will in effect remove the contribution from the lower atmosphere. This is basically the same technique we use for images of Titan's surface. Can anyone confirm this imaging strategy, or is this just wishful thinking on my part...

[elakdawalla]

Louise wasn't that specific about the imaging strategy but she did say that they were using two NIR filters at, she thought, about 1 micron and about 1020 nm; and doing ratios seems to be a good reason to try two filters. The reason I'm doubtful that this will succeed is that I would have thought that if it turned out to be possible to see the surface this way, VIRTIS would already have done it. And it doesn't seem that Venus Express has managed to produce surface images. They have a less sharp imager but it has much higher spectral resolution -- it just seems that if this process works, it should already have been tried and found to succeed for VIRTIS.

--Emily