The Art Neuro Weblog

It's Been a Long Time Mercury, But Here We Come
This is hot off the press from Cape Canaveral. NASA is firing the Messenger craft to Mercury. It is the first time we are sending a probe to the planet closest to the sun in 30years since Mariner 10. I can't believe it's been that long since mariner 10, but there you go.

Even at that, members of the Johns Hopkins University spacecraft team assembled in Cape Canaveral realize this mission can't compete with Mars and its rovers, or Saturn and its newly arrived sentry, Cassini.
But there are plenty of cool facts about this red-hot mission, besides the off-the-charts-SPF sunscreen that was baked for days in ground testing.

You can see yourself in Messenger's twin solar wings, made up of a couple thousand little mirrors to reflect the intense sunlight in Mercury's neighborhood. The wings are two-thirds mirrors and just one-third electricity-producing solar cells.
Diode heat pipes burrowed into the extraordinarily insulated spacecraft will radiate internal heat from all the electronics. When Messenger passes between the sun and Mercury and it gets really sweltering — not too often and not for long because of Messenger's cleverly conceived flight plan — these pipes will shut down and the boxy craft will be like a house with all the windows closed on a steamy afternoon.

"It's basically a Thermos bottle," Ercol explained.
"We're actually taking on a very brutal mission from the standpoint of the sun and then from the orbiting standpoint because the planet itself is very hot."

Even though Mercury is 50 million miles from Earth at closest approach, Messenger will travel 5 billion miles to get there. It's technologically infeasible to fly straight to Mercury, a trip of a few months, and so the spacecraft must swing once past Earth, twice past Venus and thrice past Mercury before slowing down enough to slip into orbit around Mercury.
Estimated arrival time: March 2011.

Are we impressed yet? It turns out we haven't been back to mercury for this long because we have not had the technology to even consider it. Now, with th heat shielded thermos bottle design, Messenger will be able to get up close and personal with the little fella who lives in the furnace heat of the sun.

- Art Neuro