Features
The MESSENGER spacecraft delivered a critical deep-space maneuver today – 64 million miles (103 million kilometers) from Earth – successfully firing its large bi-propellant engine to change the probe’s trajectory and target it for its second flyby of Mercury on October 6, 2008. This was the first trajectory-correction maneuver (TCM) to test the continuous slow rotation of the spacecraft throughout the burn, essential for the March 18, 2011, Mercury orbit-insertion (MOI) maneuver.
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New Horizons detected Pluto using the high-resolution mode of its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) during three separate sets of observations in October 2007. This made it easier for scientists to “find” Pluto among a sea of background stars.
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MISSION UPDATES
As MESSENGER sped by Mercury on January 14, 2008, the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) captured this image, which includes the edge of the planet against the blackness of space. Much of the foreground shows a portion of Caloris basin, one of the largest impact basins in the solar system.
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As MESSENGER flew by Mercury on January 14, 2008, the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) captured this view. Two of the larger craters in this image appear to have darkened crater rims and partial “halos” of dark material immediately surrounding the craters. Both craters appear to have nearly complete rims and interior terraced walls, suggesting that they formed more recently than the other nearby shallower craters of similar size.
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New Horizons passed a planetary milepost this morning when it reached a distance of 9 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun – or nine times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. “The spacecraft destined for the ninth planet is now just beyond 9 AU and continuing outbound for the solar system’s frontier,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern.
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Two weeks ago, on January 14, 2008, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to see the side of Mercury shown in this image. The first image transmitted back to Earth following the flyby of Mercury, and then released to the web within hours, shows the historic first look at the previously unseen side. This image, taken by the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), shows a closer view of much of that territory.
Just above and to the left of center of this image is a small crater with a pronounced set of bright rays extending across Mercury's surface away from the crater. Bright rays are commonly made in a crater-forming explosion when an asteroid strikes the surface of an airless body like the Moon or Mercury. But rays fade with time as tiny meteoroids and particles from the solar wind strike the surface and darken the rays. The prominence of these rays implies that the small crater at the center of the ray pattern formed comparatively recently.
This image is one in a planned set of 99. Nine different views of Mercury were snapped in this set to create a mosaic pattern with images in three rows and three columns. The WAC is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters, and each of the nine different views was acquired through all 11 filters. This image was taken in filter 7, which is sensitive to light near the red end of the visible spectrum (750 nm), and shows features as small as about 6 kilometers (4 miles) in size. The MESSENGER team is studying this previously unseen side of Mercury in detail to map and identify new geologic features and to construct the planet’s geological history.
December 19, 2007Global Map Reveals Mineral Distribution on Mars
More than 200 just-released “spectral maps” reveal the distribution of various minerals on the surface of Mars—the first installment of the Global Mars Map, which will eventually cover the entire planet. The map is built from tens of thousands of image strips each about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) wide and thousands of kilometers long, revealing data from 72 carefully selected wavelengths that cover absorptions indicative of the mineral groups that CRISM is looking for on Mars.
