Sean Solomon, director of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has been leading NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury for the last four years. MESSENGER is the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.
Mar 27, 2015
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NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, which is toting an $8.7 million University of Colorado at Boulder instrument, will make its third and final flyby of Mercury on Sept. 29 -- a clever gravity-assist maneuver that will steer it ...
Space Exploration
Sep 28, 2009
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On March 25, the MESSENGER spacecraft completed its 4,000th orbit of Mercury, and the lowest point in its orbit continues to move closer to the planet than ever before. The orbital phase of the MESSENGER mission, which was ...
Space Exploration
Mar 30, 2015
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MESSENGER has now returned more than 200,000 images acquired from orbit about Mercury. The 1996 proposal for the mission promised a return of at least 1,000 images says Robert Gold, MESSENGER's Science Payload Manager. "We ...
Space Exploration
Feb 6, 2014
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Shortly before 5:55 p.m. EDT, MESSENGER skimmed 228 kilometers (141 miles) above the surface of Mercury in its third and final flyby of the planet.
Space Exploration
Sep 30, 2009
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On April 20, 2013, at 2:54 a.m. EDT, the sun erupted with a coronal mass ejection (CME), a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of solar particles into space that can affect electronic systems in satellites. Experimental ...
Space Exploration
Apr 22, 2013
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A Goddard-built instrument on NASA's MESSENGER mission provided one of three new lines of evidence that water ice exists near the north pole of Mercury. Most of the ice is covered by a thin layer of material that blankets ...
Space Exploration
Nov 29, 2012
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NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury has released an updated ACT-QuickMap tool with new 3-D navigation capabilities as illustrated by this "fly around" view of the Caloris impact basin. This update was among the new and improved ...
Space Exploration
May 19, 2017
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