NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, bound for Mercury, took one small step yesterday as it left NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland for Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it's slated to launch May 11.
Here, engineer Jack Ercol from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) checks the condition of the spacecraft’s ceramic-fabric sunshade after testing in the thermal-vacuum chamber at Goddard. The tests showed that the sunshade, approximately 8 feet tall and 6 feet wide, will keep MESSENGER’s instruments and systems at room temperature while the spacecraft orbits the planet closest to the Sun.
Secured in an air-conditioned moving van, MESSENGER is due to arrive at the Cape today.
The spacecraft spent the past three months being baked, frozen, spun, shaken and probed in Goddard's test facilities, experiencing the conditions of launch and its upcoming five-year journey. Over the next several weeks, APL will prepare the spacecraft for launch at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near Kennedy Space Center. Other team members will continue to test the spacecraft’s key operating systems remotely from the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at APL.
MESSENGER will fly past Venus three times and Mercury twice before starting its yearlong orbital study of Mercury in July 2009. The Venus flybys, in November 2004, August 2005 and October 2006, use the planet’s gravity to guide MESSENGER toward Mercury’s orbit. Mercury flybys in October 2007 and July 2008 further tune MESSENGER’s path and allow the spacecraft to gather data critical to planning the mission’s orbital phase.
