Mercury flyby today

 

MESSENGER is to visit Mercury for a much needed gravity-assist.

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The historic occasion scheduled for tonight will mark NASA’s return to Mercury for the first time in almost 33 years. The MESSENGER spacecraft will reach its closest approach to Mercury at 7.04pm GMT (2.04pm EST). The craft will travel at 200 kilometres from the surface, providing MESSENGER with a much needed gravity-assist to power the spacecraft for its 2011 mission – an orbit insertion around Mercury.
 
“The MESSENGER Science Team is extremely excited about this flyby,” said Dr. Sean C. Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator, from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “ We are about to enjoy our first close-up view of Mercury in more than three decades, and a successful gravity assist will ensure that MESSENGER remains on the trajectory needed to place it into orbit around the innermost planet for the first time.”
 
Apart from sourcing a gravity-assist, the MESSENGER craft will perform many operations, including mapping the mineralogical composition of Mercury’s surface and determining the structure of Mercury’s magnetic field with its onboard scientific instruments. The instruments will make the first up-close measurements since the Mariner 10, which made its third and last flyby of Mercury in 1975.

Images of Mercury

Cameras onboard for the orbit insertion around Mercury will also take 1,200 images of the planet during its gravity-assist encounter and departure.
 
“When the Mariner 10 spacecraft did its flybys in the mid-1970s, it saw only one hemisphere – a little less than half the planet,” commented Dr. L. M. Prockter, instrument scientist for the Mercury Dual Imaging System, and a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).  “During this flyby we will begin to image the hemisphere that has never been seen by a spacecraft and at resolutions that are comparable to or better than those acquired by Mariner 10 and in a number of different colour filters so that we can start to get an idea of the composition of the surface.”

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