Engineering: Message from Mercury

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft performed a gravity assist to help it complete its orbit of Mercury by 2011.

As it performed the difficult maneuver, it managed to picture 30 per cent of the planet’s surface, atmosphere and magnetic field that has never been seen before by a spacecraft. A gravity assist is a trajectory that passes close to a planetary body in order to gain energy from its gravitational field.

"The region of Mercury's surface that we viewed at close range for the first time this month is bigger than the land area of South America," said Sean Solomon, principal investigator and director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "When combined with data from our first flyby and from Mariner 10, our latest coverage means that we have now seen about 95 per cent of the planet."

MESSENGER’s cameras took more than 1,200 pictures of the surface while the craft’s probe's Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) measured the planet’s topography. The Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer observed Mercury's thin atmosphere, known as an exosphere.

"Now that MESSENGER's cameras have imaged more than 80 per cent of Mercury [in total], it is clear that, unlike the moon and Mars, Mercury's surface is more homogeneously ancient and heavily cratered, with large extents of younger volcanic plains lying within and between giant impact basins," said co-investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe.

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