NASA's Mercury-bound MESSENGER spacecraft
swung past the planet Venus, the
first of two visits to the cloudy planet.
MESSENGER,
short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, is
taking a roundabout path to the innermost planet in our Solar System, with no
less than six planetary passes to reach the small world in March 2011.
Shown here
are two images from MESSENGER’s cameras as it swung past Venus this week. The
spacecraft flew by Venus in the early morning hours of Oct. 24, 2006, coming
within 1,860 miles (2,990 kilometers) of the shrouded planet.
These
images were taken while MESSENGER was still 20 days and 10.3 million (16.5
million kilometer) away from its Venusian close encounter.
MESSENGER’s
Dual Imaging System is designed to scan the rocky surface of Mercury and not
the tumultuous clouds of Venus, hence the planet’s fuzzy blob-like features.
Mission
managers at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in
Laurel, Maryland, which oversees MESSENGER for NASA, fully expected an
unfocused view of Venus.
“So we are
not making any scientific observations at the time of this flyby,” said Sean Solomon,
the mission's principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington,
in a statement. “We shall conduct a full suite of observations surrounding the
second flyby in June 2007.”
MESSENGER’s
Oct. 24 Venus flyby was the second planetary pass of the spacecraft’s mission.
The probe swung
by Earth on Aug. 2, 2005 [image]
– just one day shy of its one-year launch
anniversary – and is due to revisit Venus next year. [Click here
for video of the Earth flyby.]
MESSENGER
is then expected make its first pass by Mercury in January 2008, fly by the
planet again in October of that year, make one last pass in 2009 before finally
settling into its science orbit in March 2011.
-- Tariq Malik
