NASA's MESSENGER Space Probe Arrives at Mercury

In August, 2004, a small robotic spacecraft hurtled skywards to begin a 4.9 billion mile trek to the planet Mercury. Today, 6 years later, that spacecraft arrives and officially becomes the first artificial satellite of Mercury in history.

MESSENGER arrives at Mercury (Artists Depiction)

It amazes me what this little space-probe, named "MESSENGER" has been through in that time. Over those 6 years, it has orbited the Sun a staggering 15 times! Think about that, it takes us a year to orbit once (of course), which gives you an idea of the terrific speed at which this craft travels, and the phenomenal distance it has covered.

Along the way it has made a fly-by of Earth, two of Venus, and three preliminary fly-bys of Mercury! But guess what Sean Solomon (Principle Mission Investigator) said about today: "This is when the real mission begins!" It's times like this that make we wonder how mind-blowingly amazing it must be to work for NASA.

Earth - as seen from Mercury

Here's some more interesting stuff: as the craft approached the planet, it took a quick picture of the Earth (and moon) which you can see here. What an eye-opening perspective this gives us!

So, what's next for MESSENGER? Well, we haven't really had a great deal of detail on Mercury in the past, especially when compared to Mars or Venus which have had multiple robots both orbit and land on them. Although MESSENGER is not a lander, it will soon start to give us some really useful data on Mercury's surface. Images, thermal and radar readings among others will give us our first real detailed view of our third nearest neighbour.

Given that the vast majority of extrasolar planets that we have discovered orbit their parent stars at Mercury-like distances, the data gleaned from the MESSENGER mission will serve to boost our understanding of other solar systems too.