MESSENGER Status Report
1/18/05

On Jan. 12, the MESSENGER science, engineering and mission operations teams successfully conducted the second absolute radiometric calibration for the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument. Repeating an exercise carried out last Nov. 29, operators tilted the spacecraft 27 degrees so the camera could image sunlight reflected off a target inside the payload attachment fitting, which surrounds MDIS and three other science instruments on MESSENGER's lower deck.

"The operation went very smoothly," reports Mission Operations Manager Mark Holdridge, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD.

Other activities included turning on the backup Integrated Electronics Module for routine housekeeping operations.

MESSENGER is about 94.4 million miles from the Sun and 30.2 million miles from Earth. At that distance, a signal from Earth reaches the spacecraft in 2 minutes, 42 seconds. The spacecraft is moving around the Sun at 65,538 miles per hour. MESSENGER's onboard computers have executed 25,230 commands from mission operators since launch on Aug. 2, 2004.

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