MESSENGER Enters Orbit Around Mercury

krswan writes "From the NASA press release: 'At 9:10 p.m. EDT, engineers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., received the anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around the planet Mercury.' If you don't know much about this little spacecraft, check out its website. Designed with a completely passive cooling system, it will stay at 600C on the sun side, but room temperature behind the sunshade. During its 6-year journey it used solar panels as sails, relying on the solar wind instead of thrusters to adjust its trajectory. Over the next year it will build a high-res map of Mercury, and maybe determine if there is really ice hiding within polar craters (PDF)."

Comments

This is what space exploration should look like

[lwsimon]

This is what we should be doing - high-tech, compact probes doing important work all over the solar system.

Guys in suits in space is cool, but we need to learn, understand, and develop commercial applications first. The rest will come in time.

Re:Untrue

[Buggz]

Not for boost, but for steering aka adjusting trajectory - sure! Like when you're rowing, just dipping an oar into the water will cause your boat to turn.