Messenger

Last crawled date: 1 year, 7 months ago

The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe is a NASA spacecraft, launched August 3, 2004 to study the characteristics and environment of Mercury from orbit. Specifically, the mission is to characterize the chemical composition of Mercury's surface, the geologic history, the nature of the magnetic field, the size and state of the core, the volatile inventory at the poles, and the nature of Mercury's exosphere and magnetosphere over a nominal orbital mission of one Earth year. The mission is the first to visit Mercury in over 30 years; the only previous probe to visit Mercury was Mariner 10, which completed its mission in March 1975. The MESSENGER has vastly improved scanning capability, with cameras capable of resolving surface features to 18 meters (59 ft) across compared to the 1.6 kilometres (0.99 mi) resolution of the Mariner 10. MESSENGER is an orbital mission, and will spend over a year imaging the entire planet; Mariner 10 was a flyby mission and was only able to observe the one hemisphere that was lit during its flybys. The contrived acronym MESSENGER was chosen because Mercury was the messenger of the gods according to Roman mythology. #Esa #Jeroen_Hut #Mecury #Messenger #Mission #Nasa #Orbit #Space #Spacecraft