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Space Briefs

Posted on: Thursday, 5 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

Mission to Mercury

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The spacecraft Messenger rocketed away Tuesday on a long quest to reveal the secrets of mysterious, superhot Mercury, the sun's nearest planet.

"A voyage of mythological proportions," a NASA flight controller announced as soon as Messenger shed its final rocket stage hours before dawn.

The journey will take 6 1/2 years, covering nearly 5 billion miles on a roundabout ramble through the inner solar system. The probe should reach Mercury by March 2011, then spend a year gathering data.

Scientists want to know how the planet turned out the way it did, and whether the perpetually dark craters at the poles hold ice. Anything scientists can learn about how Mercury formed will shed light on the origins of Venus, Earth and Mars, each one very different.

The Messenger mission is part of NASA's bargain-focused Discovery program - $427 million for the launch and all the scientific analysis years later in a mission devised by Johns Hopkins University.

If all goes well, Messenger will be the first spacecraft to orbit that planet. The heat encountered in orbit will be the equivalent of 11 suns beating down on Earth, about 700 degrees.

But its instruments will operate at room temperature, protected by a custom-built ceramic-fabric sunshade just one-quarter of an inch thick.

Space station walk

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Two spacewalking astronauts improved the parking situation at the international space station on Tuesday, putting up the latest devices for guiding in a brand new line of cargo ships.

Russian Gennady Padalka and American Mike Fincke installed laser reflectors and antennas for the cargo carrier that's due to arrive in another year, and hung out fresh science experiments in place of old ones.

To prepare for the arrival of a European supply ship that has been in the pipeline for years and is running late, Padalka and Fincke replaced outdated laser reflectors with newer models.

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