University of Colorado scientists gear up for Mercury mission flyby of Venus
Contact: William McClintock
William.Mcclintock@colorado.edu
303-492-8407
University of Colorado at Boulder
~snip "This event at Venus will be a very good tune-up for our first flyby of Mercury next January," said LASP Director Daniel Baker, also a co-investigator on the MESSENGER team. "The first encounter with Mercury will be extremely valuable, as it will essentially double the amount of information we now have about the planet."
A space physicist, Baker is interested in the magnetic field of Mercury and its interaction with the solar wind, including "substorms" associated with Mercury's magnetic field that occur in the planet's vicinity. Understanding Mercury's surface, tenuous atmosphere and magnetic field are the keys to understanding the evolution of the inner solar system, he said.
Mercury was visited only once before by a spacecraft, in 1974 and 1975, when NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft made three flybys and mapped roughly 45 percent of the planet's rocky surface at the time.
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