CU team prepares for sneak peek at Mercury
| September 28, 2009 | 10:15 AM
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NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft will do a flyby of Mercury on Tuesday, and a University of Colorado spectrometer will take advantage of the opportunity to analyze a few select targets such as surface craters.
“One of the big questions planetary scientists have is how much iron there is on Mercury’s surface,” said said CU Senior Research Associate William McClintock of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “We hope to pinpoint the iron, determine what chemical form it is in and how it is bound up on the planet’s surface.”
In addition to the CU team’s work, MESSENGER will take high-resolution photos of the surface and make measurements of ultraviolet and visible light on Mercury, in its atmosphere and in the gas cloud that trails the planet.
The flyby is part of a series of gravity-assisted maneuvers to prepare MESSENGER to enter Mercury’s orbit in 2011. It’s already made one flyby of Earth, two of Venus and two others of Mercury.
On Friday, the spacecraft snapped a picture of a crescent Mercury as it approached the planet. Once it settles into its final orbit, it will do additional study of Mercury’s geologic history, composition and magnetic field. The mission’s aim is to provide us with a better understanding of how the planets in the solar system formed.
astronomy, mercury, messenger, planetary science, university of colorado
