NASA’s MESSENGER Spacecraft Ready to Enter Mercury Orbit

Messenger Spacecraft Approaches Mercury - credit NASA

NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has completed its more than six year journey from the Earth and is scheduled to enter orbit around Mercury on the 17^th of March. The spacecraft must now be slowed to eventually settle into a 12-hour orbit around the innermost planet in our solar system.

To reduce its current speed by over 1900 miles per hour, MESSENGER will fire its largest thruster for about 14 minutes using up about a third of the fuel with which it departed the Earth. At that time the spacecraft will have used up about 90% of its fuel, and what remains will be used for any future orbital corrections.

“This is a milestone event for our small, but highly experienced, operations team, marking the end of six and one half years of successfully shepherding the spacecraft through six planetary flybys, five major propulsive maneuvers, and sixteen trajectory-correction maneuvers, all while simultaneously preparing for orbit injection and primary mission operations,” said MESSENGER Systems Engineer Eric Finnegan. “Whatever the future holds, this team of highly dedicated engineers has done a phenomenal job methodically generating, testing, and verifying commands to the spacecraft, getting MESSENGER where it is today.”

In this first-of-its-kind mission, MESSENGER will conduct its research from a 124 mile high orbit above the planet. The craft will use a variety of imaging equipment and instruments to collect data and beam it back to researchers on the Earth about 96 million miles away.