IAA recognizes MESSENGER mission

The 2012 Laurels for Team Achievement, presented annually by the International Academy of Astronautics, has been presented this year to the collaborators working on NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER mission).

MESSENGER Project Scientist Ralph McNutt, MESSENGER Co-investigator Stamatios Krimigis and MESSENGER Mission Design Lead Engineer James McAdams, all from Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory, accepted the award on September 30 at the opening ceremony of IAA’s 63rd International Astronautical Congress in Naples before an audience of 300, including the heads of 14 space agencies.

“It is a remarkable feat indeed, when one recognizes that APL has built successful missions to the hottest...and coldest planets...of our solar system, the MESSENGER and New Horizons spacecraft,” Krimigis wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “I’m looking forward to the Lab getting similar recognition after 2015 when we fly by Pluto.”

MESSENGER was designed as part of NASA’s Discovery program to conduct the first orbital study of the innermost planet, which scientist believe holds answers to understanding how the planets of our Solar System evolved, particularly the terrestrial planets like Venus, Earth and Mars.

Mercury was chosen because it is unique among the planets of the Solar System — being the closest to the Sun, as well as being the smallest, densest and the one with the oldest surface with the largest daily variations in surface temperature of all eight planets. MESSENGER seeks to answer important questions that could shed a light on Mercury’s evolutionary history including the nature of its magnetic field, the structure of its core, the reason for its high density, the unusual materials at its poles, the important volatiles at the planet’s thin atmosphere and the details of the planet’s geological history.

MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to return new data about Mercury since the Mariner 10 mission more than 30 years ago. Before the launch of MESSENGER, only 45 percent of Mercury’s surface had been photographed. During its journey, the craft performed one flyby of Earth, two flybys of Venus and three flybys of Mercury.

The orbiter has made observations about Mercury that details its uniqueness among the planets. This includes a tectonic history unlike that of any of the other terrestrial planets. Using X-rays, gamma-rays and visible–infrared spectrometers to determine the elemental and mineralogical makeup of the rocks, it has been able to glean evidence of the history that created Mercury’s unusual surface.

The planet’s magnetic field is also unique due to its stronger interactions with the Sun’s solar wind. It has a large global dipole similar to that of Earth’s, but the other terrestrial planets and the Moon only have smaller localized magnetic fields. The mere fact that it has a magnetic field was of some surprise to observers, given its proximity to the Sun.

The award’s citation described MESSENGER as “an extraordinary, comprehensive scientific overview of the planet, its makeup, its exosphere and its magnetosphere, providing the text for a new and overdue chapter of humankind’s knowledge of the smallest of the terrestrial planets.”

The Laurels for Team Achievement is one of two major awards presented by the IAA, the other being for individual achievement. The MESSENGER team joins a group of famous successful astronautical teams which have also won the Team Achievement award including:

• The Mars Exploration Rover team in 2007, which launched Spirit and Opportunity to collect data about the Martian surface
• The Cassini-Huygens Program in 2006, which collects data about Saturn and its many moons
• The Hubble Space Telescope team in 2004
• The Space Shuttle Program in 2002, NASA’s 30 year manned launch vehicle program, which completed more than 130 successful missions, many focusing on the construction of the International Space Station.