Spacecraft to help CU team shed more light on Mercury

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 11, 2008 at 12:30 a.m.

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Photo by University Of Colorado

The MESSENGER craft will pass close to Mercury.

NASA will get its first close-up look at Mercury in more than three decades Monday when its MESSENGER spacecraft will fly within 125 miles of the planet and point an instrument at its surface that was made at the University of Colorado.

Mercury is just two planets away, but scientists know very little about what it's made of, or much about its radiation-filled atmosphere.

MESSENGER is the size of a small car, and CU's Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer weighs only seven pounds. But it can break up light like a prism, unveiling the unique spectral "signature" of every element in the solar system.

That means it can determine the abundance of minerals and gases on Mercury's hot, rocky surface and in its thin atmosphere.

The spectrometer cost $8.7 million to build, and has been aboard MESSENGER since it was launched in August 2004. It flew past Venus twice.

The spacecraft should zip by Mercury about 11:25 a.m. MST on Monday, taking data and images for about 90 minutes - the first of three scheduled fly-bys, said Mark Lankton of CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

It will be a quick peek, because MESSENGER will be cruising at about 141,000 mph, Lankton said.

The information will be sent via NASA's Deep Space Network to the applied physics lab at Johns Hopkins University, which is managing the mission for NASA. CU researchers and students will be there to collect the data and immediately start analyzing it, said Lankton, program manager for MASCS.

The only other time that a spacecraft visited Mercury was in 1974 and 1975 when NASA's Mariner 10 made three fly-bys and mapped about 45 percent of the surface.

"Believe it or not, scientists have only a vague idea today about the composition of Mercury's surface," said LASP Senior Research Associate William McClintock, who led the MASCS instrument development team.

The spacecraft will fly through a comet-shaped cloud of sodium enveloping the planet, McClintock said. Scientists want to find out how the cloud is replenished with sodium.

Mercury averages 800 degrees Fahrenheit near its surface. MESSENGER has a large sunshade and heat-resistant ceramic fabric to protect it from the sun during its circuitous, 7-year 4.9-billion-mile journey, which will require 13 loops around the sun.

But sandwiched between hot Mercury and the even hotter sun, the spacecraft "will essentially be on a huge rotisserie," LASP director Daniel Baker said.

Baker will study Mercury's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind, including violent "sub-storms" near the planet.

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