18-October-2007, 11:45 PM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 13,458
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Planetary Society Weblog: MESSENGER is on target for its January Mercury flyby
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The MESSENGER mission team reports today that they have successfully completed the deep space maneuver that was designed to line the spacecraft up for its first flyby of Mercury.
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Johns Hopkins University: Messenger Mission News
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“Everything went as planned, and we are now on target for a flyby of Mercury in January 2008,” said Mission Operations Manager Andy Calloway of APL, adding that this maneuver was the most critical of the mission other than orbit insertion, primarily because of the timing. ”Deep-Space Maneuver-2 (DSM-2) was executed just nine days prior to the start of the longest solar conjunction communications outage period of the mission,” he said. “So there was limited opportunity to correct problems and to obtain good orbit determination data for the navigation team.”
“The MESSENGER team is breathing a lot easier now that we’ve seen the successful completion of this most important course-correction maneuver before Mercury orbit insertion,” McAdams said. “Not only did DSM-2 put MESSENGER on target for the first spacecraft encounter with Mercury in nearly 33 years, it was completed with the least margin for error of all five DSMs before Mercury arrival in March 2011.”
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