NASA’s Messenger spacecraft is scheduled to launch today on a 5 billion-mile trip to Mercury – the first visit in almost 30 years to the most extreme and least studied of the inner planets.
It will take seven years for the $427 million probe to reach Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. The probe will orbit the planet for one year, taking color pictures of the entire surface, as well as gathering data on the composition and structure of the crust, the shape and strength of the magnetic field, the makeup of the core and the nature of the material in the polar craters.
Mercury is surprisingly different from the other rocky planets – Venus, Earth and Mars. The planet is made mostly of iron, making it the densest for its size in the solar system.
It has a magnetic field, even though scientists say such a diminutive planet should not be able to maintain one. And it may have water ice hiding in the shadows of the polar craters – despite temperatures as high as 850 degrees in the sun.
“It’s a pretty bizarre place,” said Sean Solomon, Messenger’s principal investigator from the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.
Messenger, managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., will launch aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
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