Astrogeology and the Messenger

There has been a lot of talk about returning to the moon or finding life on Mars ( all of which is important) but the Messenger was launched in 2004 to map and study Mercury. From the article:

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on August 3, 2004. It returned to Earth for a gravity boost on August 2, 2005, and flew past Venus twice, in October 2006 and June 2007. The spacecraft uses the tug of Venus' gravity to resize and rotate its trajectory closer to Mercury's orbit.

Three Mercury flybys, each followed about two months later by a course correction maneuver, will put MESSENGER in position to enter Mercury orbit in March 2011. During the January 2008, October 2008, and September 2009 flybys, MESSENGER mapped nearly the entire planet and imaged most of the areas unseen by Mariner 10.

It is amazing to me that the Messenger has been on and off its mission for so many years and will continue to work into the next few years.

In combining MDIS (Mercury Dual Imaging System) images collected from these three MESSENGER flyby's with those from Mariner 10 data from the 1970s, we now have a global mosaic of Mercury covering ~97.72% of the planet's surface.

If you click on the link there is an interactive map of Mercury if you are into that kind of thing.

On television or in the movies, everything in space happens so quickly, in an episode of Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise can fix the geologic problems of a planet they have just encountered! I know it is fiction and enjoy the interpersonal aspects of the show, I also realize that any work in space takes time. The Space Shuttle has to spend time on the International Space Station installing new parts.

I wish the news would cover more stories about spacecraft that has been dispatched to study different aspects of our solar system, but I guess that would be too boring for people.

Anyway, here is the link the the article and map.