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Mercury (Planet): Nasa Mariner
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"With the Messenger Mercury probe en route Exploring Mercury, the latest book in the Springer Praxis Astronomy and Space Science series, is timely. Its written by two planetary scientists and comprehensively reviews what is currently known about the tiny planet. A nice touch a CD-ROM is included containing over seven hundred of the best Mariner images and mosaics . The book is technical but written so that an interested amateur can understand it without specialist knowledge."
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Mercury passes between the Earth and Sun only a dozen times a century. The May 7, 2003, transit was imaged with NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft, with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), and from many professional and amateur ground-based sites.
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In 2004, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to launch the $286 million MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft. It will reach Mercury five years later, enter orbit, then examine the planet's atmosphere and entire surface for one Earth year with a suite of detectors including cameras, spectrometers, and a magnetometer. MESSENGER will ... explore Mercury's atmosphere and determine the size of the planet's core and how much of it is solid. Finally, the spacecraft will try to confirm whether water ice exists in polar craters on Mercury.
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Recent radar observations have suggested that water ice may be present in small quantities at Mercury's north pole. Such water, if it exists, is likely located at the permanently shaded bottoms of craters where it is deposited by comet impacts. A new mission to Mercury has been approved by Nasa, named Messenger, and will launch in 2004 to orbit Mercury starting in 2009.
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Ground-based observations did not shed much further light on the innermost planet, and it was not until space probes visited Mercury that many of its most fundamental properties became known. However, recent technological advances have led to improved ground-based observations: in 2000, high-resolution lucky imaging from the Mount Wilson Observatory 60-inch telescope provided the first detailed views of the parts of Mercury which were not imaged in the Mariner missions.
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The spacecraft, launched by NASA in August 2004, is only about halfway through a circuitous 4.9 billion mile journey needed to maneuver it into orbit around Mercury, the planet nearest the sun. The journey involves more than 15 trips around the sun, including flying by the Earth once, passing Venus twice and three swings around Mercury before slipping into orbit on March 18, 2011.
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