MESSENGER on a Crash Course with Mercury and History

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bystander
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MESSENGER on a Crash Course with Mercury and History

Post by bystander » Fri Apr 17, 2015 6:53 pm

NASA Celebrates MESSENGER Mission Prior to Surface Impact of Mercury
Johns Hopkins University Advanced Physics Laboratory
NASA | Carnegie Institute for Science | 2015 Apr 16
Top 10 Science Results and Top 10 Technology Innovations

Mercury MESSENGER nears epic mission end
University of Michigan | 2015 Apr 16

After successful mission to Mercury,
spacecraft on a crash course with history

University of Colorado | 2015 Apr 16
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.
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neufer
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Re: MESSENGER on a Crash Course with Mercury and History

Post by neufer » Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:24 pm

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php?id=284 wrote: <<Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., confirmed today that NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft impacted the surface of Mercury, as predicted, at 3:26 p.m. EDT this afternoon (3:34 p.m. ground time).

MESSENGER was launched on August 3, 2004, and it began orbiting Mercury on March 18, 2011. The spacecraft completed its primary science objectives by March 2012. Last month -- during a final short extension of the mission referred to as XM2'-- the team embarked on a hover campaign that allowed the spacecraft at its closest approach to operate within a narrow band of altitudes, 5 to 35 kilometers above the planet's surface.

With no way to increase its altitude, MESSENGER was finally unable to resist the perturbations to its orbit by the Sun's gravitational pull, and it slammed into Mercury's surface at around 8,750 miles per hour, creating a new crater up to 52 feet wide.

The mood in the Mission Operations Center at APL was both celebratory and somber, as team members watched MESSENGER's telemetry drop out for the last time after more than four years and 4,105 orbits at Mercury.

"We then monitored MESSENGER's beacon signal for about 25 additional minutes," said Mission Operations Manager Andy Calloway of APL. "It was strange to think that for those last three minutes MESSENGER had already impacted onto Mercury, but we could not confirm that fact yet because of the vast distance across space between Mercury and Earth. MESSENGER passed behind Mercury (as viewed from Earth) at 3:29 p.m., however the signal from our intrepid spacecraft started fading prior to that and dropped out for the last time at 3:25 p.m."

Before impact, MESSENGER's mission design team predicted that the spacecraft would pass several miles over the lava-filled Shakespeare impact basin before striking an unnamed ridge near 54.5 degrees North latitude and 210.1 degrees East longitude. Because the probe hit on the far side of the planet, no Earth-based telescope was able to observe the impact. Moreover, space-based telescopes are precluded from observing Mercury because of the planet's proximity to the Sun, exposure to which would damage sensitive optics and instruments.>>
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Re: MESSENGER on a Crash Course with Mercury and History

Post by Doum » Fri May 01, 2015 4:15 am

Farewell messenger. i hope the crater you made will be name messenger crater or farewell crater? Time and people will decide.

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neufer
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Four thousand one hundred and five, that's the exact number

Post by neufer » Fri May 01, 2015 6:12 pm

Doum wrote:
Farewell messenger. i hope the crater you made will be name messenger crater or farewell crater?
Time and people will decide.
  • How about Haigha or Hatta crater? (He died on a Hill at periHermion.)
She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.

The next moment soldiers came running through the wood, at first in twos and threes, then ten or twenty together, and at last in such crowds that they seemed to fill the whole forest. Alice got behind a tree, for fear of being run over, and watched them go by.

She thought that in all her life she had never seen soldiers so uncertain on their feet: they were always tripping over something or other, and whenever one went down, several more always fell over him, so that the ground was soon covered with little heaps of men.

Then came the horses. Having four feet, these managed rather better than the foot-soldiers: but even they stumbled now and then; and it seemed to be a regular rule that, whenever a horse stumbled the rider fell off instantly. The confusion got worse every moment, and Alice was very glad to get out of the wood into an open place, where she found the White King seated on the ground, busily writing in his memorandum-book.

`I've sent them all!' the King cried in a tone of delight, on seeing Alice. `Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?'

`Yes, I did,' said Alice: several thousand, I should think.'

`Four thousand two hundred and seven, that's the exact number,' the King said, referring to his book. `I couldn't send all the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven't sent the two MESSENGERs, either. They're both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.'

`I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.

`I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!'

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. `I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. `But he's coming very slowly -- and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the MESSENGER kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

`Not at all,' said the King. `He's an Anglo-Saxon MESSENGER -- and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy. His name is Haigha.' (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with `mayor.')

`I love my love with an H,' Alice couldn't help beginning,' because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with -- with -- with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives -- '

`He lives on the Hill,' the King remarked simply, without the least idea that he was joining in the game, while Alice was still hesitating for the name of a town beginning with H. `The other MESSENGER's called Hatta. I must have two, you know -- to come and go. Once to come, and one to go.'
Art Neuendorffer

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