After successful Confirmation Assessment and Preliminary Design Reviews in May, NASA has given approval for the first Mercury orbiter mission to move into full-scale spacecraft development.

MESSENGER, short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging, will launch in March 2004 and orbit Mercury for one Earth year beginning in April 2009. MESSENGER's seven scientific instruments will provide the first ../../../images of the entire planet and collect detailed information on the composition and structure of Mercury's crust, its geologic history, the nature of its thin atmosphere and active magnetosphere, and the makeup of its core and polar materials.

MESSENGER spacecraft

"MESSENGER is the most complex and challenging Discovery-class mission we have ever attempted, and our goal is to do something never before attempted," says Dr. Jay Bergstralh, chief scientist for NASA's Solar System Exploration Division in NASA's Office of Space Science in Washington, D.C. "Conducting a yearlong mission to orbit a planet only 36 million miles from the sun for relatively low cost is an amazing concept, and we have selected a top-flight team to build and fly this mission."

Dr. Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (D.C.) is the mission's principal investigator. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., manages the mission for NASA and will design, build and operate the MESSENGER spacecraft. Preliminary work on the mission began 18 months ago.

MESSENGER will be only the second spacecraft to visit Mercury. Mariner 10 flew past it three times in 1974 and 1975 but gathered data on less than half the planet. "This is an opportunity to complete the detailed exploration of the inner solar system, on a planet where we've never even seen half the surface," said Solomon says. "We've had many exciting missions to Mars and Venus that yielded new theories about the processes that shaped the inner planets. Mercury is that last piece of the puzzle."

Click here for an animation of MESSENGER's journey to Mercury.

Read the full press release here.

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