Bolden: Mission Will 'Revolutionize' Understanding Of
Mercury
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around
Mercury at approximately 2100 EDT Thursday. This marks the
first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and
scientific milestone at our solar system's innermost planet.
"This mission will continue to revolutionize our understanding
of Mercury during the coming year," said NASA Administrator Charles
Bolden, who was at MESSENGER mission control at the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., as engineers
received telemetry data confirming orbit insertion. "NASA science
is rewriting text books. MESSENGER is a great example of how our
scientists are innovating to push the envelope of human
knowledge."
At 2110 EDT, engineers Operations Center, received the
anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown
and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around
the planet Mercury. NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment,
GEochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER, rotated back to the Earth
by 2145 EDT, and started transmitting data. Upon review of the
data, the engineering and operations teams confirmed the burn
executed nominally with all subsystems reporting a clean burn and
no logged errors.
MESSENGER's main thruster fired for approximately 15 minutes at
2045 slowing the spacecraft by 1,929 miles per hour and easing it
into the planned orbit about Mercury. The rendezvous took place
about 96 million miles from Earth.
"Achieving Mercury orbit was by far the biggest milestone since
MESSENGER was launched more than six and a half years ago," said
Peter Bedini, MESSENGER project manager of the Applied Physics
Laboratory (APL). "This accomplishment is the fruit of a tremendous
amount of labor on the part of the navigation,
guidance-and-control, and mission operations teams, who shepherded
the spacecraft through its 4.9-billion-mile journey."
For the next several weeks, APL engineers will be focused on
ensuring the spacecraft's systems are all working well in Mercury's
harsh thermal environment. Starting on March 23, the instruments
will be turned on and checked out, and on April 4 the mission's
primary science phase will begin.
"Despite its proximity to Earth, the planet Mercury has for
decades been comparatively unexplored," said Sean Solomon,
MESSENGER principal investigator of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington. "For the first time in history, a scientific
observatory is in orbit about our solar system's innermost
planet. Mercury's secrets, and the implications they hold for
the formation and evolution of Earth-like planets, are about to be
revealed."
APL designed and built the spacecraft. The lab manages and
operates the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington.