NASA Messenger: Mercury Mission - 10 Years in Space

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of its launch, the MESSENGER team released this movie showing a flyover of Mercury. The movie is sped up by a factor of seven for ease of viewing.

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Ten years ago, on August 3, 2004, NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a risky mission that would take the small satellite dangerously close to Mercury’s surface, paving the way for an ambitious study of the planet closest to the Sun.

The spacecraft traveled 4.9 billion miles (7.9 billion kilometers), a journey that included 15 trips around the Sun and flybys of Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury three times, before it was inserted into orbit around its target planet in 2011.

“We have operated successfully in orbit for more than three Earth years and more than 14 Mercury years as we celebrate this amazing 10th anniversary milestone,” said MESSENGER Mission Operations Manager Andy Calloway, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

“The MESSENGER spacecraft operates in one of the most challenging and demanding space environments in our Solar System, and we have met that challenge directly through innovation and hard work, as exemplified by the stunning discoveries and data return achievements.

Our only regret is that we have insufficient propellant to operate another 10 years, but we look forward to the incredible science returns planned for the final eight months of the mission.”

MESSENGER captured the images in the flyover movie during this flight path over Mercury's north polar region.

Image Credit: NASA

MESSENGER is only the second spacecraft sent to Mercury. Mariner 10 flew past it three times in 1974 and 1975 and gathered detailed data on less than half the surface.

MESSENGER took advantage of an ingenious trajectory design, lightweight materials, and miniaturisation of electronics, all developed in the three decades since Mariner 10 flew past Mercury.

“It was quite challenging to design and execute a trajectory that could culminate in Mercury orbit,” said Mission and Spacecraft Systems Engineer Dan O’Shaughnessy, of APL.

“Designing an attendant spacecraft that was light enough to carry the necessary propellant to execute such a trajectory with enough room left over for a payload capable of global characterisation of the planet is an impressive accomplishment.”

Additionally, he said, “the team’s concept of operations that streamlines planning while optimizing the use of our payload. despite substantial thermal and power constraints, is an amazing feat.”

MESSENGER Deputy Principal Investigator Larry Nittler, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said that the mission has rewritten scientists’ understanding of the planet “and given us plenty of surprises.”

“Geochemical measurements have revealed a surface poor in iron, but rich in moderately volatile elements such as sulphur and sodium,” said Nittler.

“These results rule out some long-standing theories put forward to explain Mercury’s anomalously high density compared with the other planets in the inner solar system,” he explained.

“Maps of elemental abundances show that the interior is highly chemically heterogeneous, providing important clues to the early geological history of the planet.”

“MESSENGER observations have also shown that Mercury’s surface was shaped by volcanic activity, identified unique landforms shaped by loss of volatile materials, and confirmed the presence of large amounts of water ice protected from the Sun’s heat within permanently shadowed impact craters near the planet’s poles, said Nittler

Infographic with statistics on the MESSENGER mission.

Image Credit: NASA

“We have found that the complex interplay of the interplanetary magnetic field with that of Mercury results in a remarkably dynamic electromagnetic environment surrounding the planet, including unexplained bursts of electrons and highly variable distributions of different elements in the thin exosphere,” Nittler added.

“Over the next few months, MESSENGER will observe Mercury at lower altitudes and thus smaller spatial scales than ever before, and this is sure to result both in exciting scientific discoveries and new puzzles about our solar system’s enigmatic innermost planet.”

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of its launch, the MESSENGER team has released a movie acquired during an early stage of MESSENGER’s low-altitude campaign.

Messenger narrow-angle camera (NAC)

The movie provides a bird’s-eye view of what the spacecraft sees as it flies over the planet at close range and was assembled from 214 images taken by the narrow-angle camera (NAC) on June 8, 2014.

The NAC’s field of view looked toward the horizon along the direction of MESSENGER's motion as the probe crossed the terminator into night.

Scott Murchie

“This view is what a traveller on the MESSENGER spacecraft might see during low-altitude operations in the coming year,” noted MESSENGER Co-Investigator Scott Murchie of APL.

“During the final phase of its mission, MESSENGER's science instruments will use low-altitude operations like this to explore the surface and subsurface of Mercury at unprecedented resolution.”

The image frames were taken once per second while MESSENGER was at altitudes ranging from 115 to 165 kilometers, traveling at a speed of 3.7 kilometers per second relative to the surface. The movie is sped up by a factor of six for ease of viewing.

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NASA Cassini Probe Celebrates 10 Years orbiting Saturn - Video

A photo taken of Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been exploring the Saturn system for 10 years. Image uploaded June 30, 2014.

Credit: NASA/JPL

NASA spacecraft Cassini passes a big milestone, a decade exploring Saturn and its many moons.

Since arriving in orbit around Saturn 10 years ago today, the Cassini probe has made a number of unprecedented observations and discoveries.

Although the spacecraft was originally approved for a four-year mission, it has been granted three mission extensions, allowing it to continue roaming the gas giant’s system.

Linda Spilker

"Having a healthy, long-lived spacecraft at Saturn has afforded us a precious opportunity," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

"By having a decade there with Cassini, we have been privileged to witness never-before-seen events that are changing our understanding of how planetary systems form and what conditions might lead to habitats for life."

For example, Cassini has helped scientists learn more about what kinds of molecules populate our solar system.

The spacecraft discovered plumes containing water-ice shooting out into space from the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.



The Enceladus discovery is one of Cassini’s most remarkable findings because it marked an extension of the search for life in the solar system, NASA officials said.

Researchers know that life as we understand it relies on water, so finding the substance on a moon or planet could be a sign that life might be able to exist there.

Scientists now think that Enceldus harbors an underground ocean.

Enceladus wasn’t the only mysterious moon Cassini helped reveal. Saturn’s huge satellite Titan has also been studied by the long-lasting orbiter.

Cassini’s measurements have shown that Titan has rain, lakes, seas and rivers like Earth, NASA officials said. Unlike Earth, however, Titan is a cold world with seas of liquid methane rather than water.

The Titan-exploring Huygens probe also launched to the Saturn system with Cassini in October 1997.

The European Space Agency’s Huygens robot landed on Titan in 2005 and became the first manmade craft to land on a moon in the outer solar system.

It measured the atmosphere and beamed images of the moon back to Earth.

“The probe’s 2 hour and 27 minute descent revealed Titan to be remarkably like Earth before life evolved, with methane rain, erosion and drainage channels and dry lake beds,” NASA officials said.

“A soup of complex hydrocarbons, including benzene, was found in Titan's atmosphere.”

Saturn's moon Tethys with its prominent Odysseus Crater silently slips behind Saturn's largest moon Titan.

Cassini has also unveiled how Saturn’s rings change over time, and because of its long tenure in the planetary system, the probe has observed seasonal changes taking place on the planet and its moons, according to NASA.

Cassini will continue to beam back data to Earth for a few more years, until 2017 when it is scheduled to intentionally plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, ending its mission.

Hydrocarbon Lakes on Titan

SpaceX Elon Musk Transporting people to Mars within 10 years

Entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk has some travel suggestions that are out of this world.

The SpaceX CEO known as the brains behind the Tesla electric car says he wants to take humans to Mars during the next decade.

Speaking to CNBC this week, the South African-born billionaire said that his main goal at this moment is to perfect technology that would make space travel possible in the not-so-distant future.

In less than 12 years' time, he said, Musk wants to make the red planet a must-stop travel destination for interstellar tourists. Soon after, though, he hopes that Earth's neighbor will be able to host humans for the long haul.

"I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said during an interview on CNBC'S "Closing Bell" on Tuesday.

"But the thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary."

Another long term issue, Musk added, is raising the capital that's required to make both visiting and inhabiting Mars an obtainable goal.

He told CNBC that the 10-year plan he's aiming for is already too long-term to attract hedge fund managers willing to invest, but at this rate that could soon change.

"We need to get where things are steady and predictable," Musk added. "Maybe we're close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we've flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense."

For now, Musk has set his sights on some goals that are a little easier to obtain. Namely, he told CNBC that he thinks an achievement more within reach would be the development of an electric car battery affordable enough to fully revolutionize the automobile industry.

"I am feeling really good about being able to produce a compelling mass-market car in about three years," said Musk, but first he hopes to find a way to sell a battery for one of those vehicles for under $5,000.

Previously, Musk told Wired magazine back in 2012 that he's been dreaming for a decade of a way to put a man on Mars, but the price-tag has proven to be problematic, to say the least.

"Since 1989, when a study estimated that a manned mission would cost $500 billion, the subject has been toxic. Politicians didn't want a high-priced federal program like that to be used as a political weapon against them," Musk told Wired at the time.

"But the United States is a nation of explorers. America is the spirit of human exploration distilled."

Musk made Elon Musk plans to take people to Mars within 10 yearss earlier this week when his electric car company, Tesla, announced it won't pursue patent lawsuits against any competing automobile makers that want to works off its patents.

"The mission of the company is to accelerate the widespread adoption of electric cars. If Tesla acts as the catalyst for other manufacturers...that will have been achieved,"Tesla spokesperson Simon Sproule told reporters.

ESA Mars Express: 10 years on, Europe salutes its Martian scout

Mars Express. Credits: Alex Lutkus

It was built on a relative shoestring, was completed in just five years and was designed to survive for just 687 days.

Ten years later, after more than 12,000 swings around the Red Planet, Europe's Mars Express is still going strong.

Along with NASA's massively successful fleet of probes and landers, the orbital scout has helped pull aside the veil of secrecy surrounding our sister planet.

It has pointed to the presence of subterranean water and a wild volcanic past and shed light on the bizarrely-pocked martian moons.

"The mission has already provided countless breathtaking views of Mars in three dimensions," says the European Space Agency (ESA).

"It has traced the history of water across the globe, demonstrating that Mars once harboured environmental conditions that may have been suitable for life."

The orbiter's seven instruments have detected minerals that form only in the presence of water and seen underground formations of water ice. Scans of the surface suggest volcanism on Mars may have persisted until recent times.

And its chemical analysis of the martian atmosphere indicates the possible presence of methane—which on Earth is attributed to active volcanism and biological life.

The first European mission to explore another planet, Mars Express was launched from Baikonur cosmodrome by a Russian Soyuz rocket on June 2 2003, just when Earth and Mars were approaching their closest alignment in 17 years.

The mission ran into a humiliating setback that December with the crash of a small British-built lander, Beagle-2, whose loss remains unexplained to this day.

But the mission, designed to last for one martian year, has already been extended four times, and its latest closure date is for the end of 2014.

ESA ExoMars

Mars Express is proving to be so sturdy that its builder, EADS Astrium, believes it may even be around in January 2016 to welcome ESA ExoMars, an unmanned European-Russian mission that will explore the methane enigma.

"Nobody would have believed it back then," says the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which developed what is arguably the star instrument aboard Mars Express: a stereoscopic camera that has imaged more than two-thirds of the planet in colour and 3D to a resolution of 20 metres (65 feet) per pixel.

Memorable images include Mars' icy southern pole and Olympus Mons which towers 26,000 metres (84,500 feet) above the surrounding plains.

Conceived as a streamlined, low-cost project, Mars Express was a gamble for ESA.

It broke with conventional thinking that planetary exploration required individually-tailored probes that took a decade to make and inevitably cost a billion bucks apiece.

To save costs, ESA's contractors essentially resorted to mass production.

ESA Rosetta

The basic box-like design for Mars Express, and for a sister spacecraft called Venus Express—launched in 2005 and also doing fine—is the same platform as for Rosetta, a comet-chasing probe whose mission is due to climax next year.

So far, exploration of Mars has cost ESA 300 million euros ($390 million), which is minute for a mission that has returned such wonders, and not a single life has been placed at risk.

Last week came proof that a manned trip to Mars would be health-threatening unless today's chemical rockets are replaced by much faster transport.

Measurements made aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, an unmanned NASA rover and mobile lab that landed in August 2012 showed exposure to high levels of radiation during its 253-day trip.

These are particles spewed out by the Sun, or coming from beyond our Solar System, that can slice through DNA and boost the risk of cancer.

Cary Zeitlin

"In terms of accumulated dose, it's like getting a whole-body CT scan once every five or six days," said Cary Zeitlin of the Southwest Research Institute's (SwRI) Space Science and Engineering Division.

"Radiation exposure at the level we measured is right at the edge, or possibly over the edge of what is considered acceptable in terms of career exposure limits defined by NASA and other space agencies."

China Aiming for Lunar Landing in 10 Years

China aims to land its first astronauts on the moon within a decade at the dawn of a new era of manned space exploration -- a race it now leads thanks to the US decision to drop its lunar programme.

US President Barack Obama earlier this month said he planned to drop the costly Constellation space programme, a budget move that would kill off future moon exploration if it is approved by Congress.

In contrast, China has a fast-growing human spaceflight project that has notched one success after another, including a spacewalk by astronauts in 2008, with plans for a manned lunar mission by around 2020.

The turnaround is viewed as yet another example of the Asian power's rising profile and technical prowess.

"Overall, China is behind the US in technology and in actual presence in space -- the US operates dozens of satellites, the Chinese only a few," said James Lewis, of the US-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

"The real concern is the trend: China's capacities are increasing while the US, despite spending billions of dollars, appears to be stuck in a rut."

The Americans have achieved the only manned lunar missions, making six trips from 1969 to 1972.