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Impressions from Team Members
January 15, 2008, 9:25 pm
I’m writing here from the ad hoc Science wrangling room of the MESSENGER mission. It’s really a commandeered conference room in my building, but the science team - more than 50 people from around the world - is going to be on hand and in residence for the next few weeks to pick through, ogle, play with, analyze, pick apart, and argue over the results of the first MESSENGER flyby of Mercury.
This is only the very tip of the iceberg of this mission, a tease, a taste of what is to come, but it is an amazing and exhilarating event; one I have been waiting for for a long time. I am certainly not alone. Bob Strom, a science team member on MESSENGER was also a member of Mariner 10’s science team in 1974 when it took the first spacecraft images of Mercury. He was 40 then. I’m 40 now, and I take a personal note at that similarity.
I’ve been waiting for this for three and a half years – since MESSENGER launched and the instruments were checked out and found to be working well.
I’ve been waiting for this for eight and a half years – since we found out our institution had won the competitive Discovery mission proposal round.
I’ve been waiting for this for ten years – since, soon after I came on here as a post-doc to work on NEAR-Shoemaker, the very first real work assignment I had was actually an early planning study for the first MESSENGER proposal’s mapping coverage.
I’ve been waiting for this for thirty-two years – since I saw the first Viking images from the surface of Mars. I remember watching a television special on Viking, watching the scientists at JPL watching the screens as the very first pictures of another world were transmitted, strip-by-strip, onto their monitors.
I’ve been waiting for this for 38 years – since my parents woke me up at age 18 months to watch the first Apollo moon landing on our black and white TV. I’ve seen it so many times since, the memory is now no longer fully authentic, but since that day my favorite toys have always been rockets, my favorite stories those of space and exploration and discovery.
Today I joined a small crowd of scientists and engineers in the MESSENGER Science Operation Center, and watched the first picture of Mercury in 33 years – showing almost a third of the planet that had never been seen in any detail before – pop up BLAM! on a screen in all of its alien glory. Details leapt out at everyone. New craters, ridges cliffs, lava flow features, tectonic features, contrasts of terrain and brightness. The image was projected on a wall screen and a half dozen laser pointers zigzagged across indicating this and that new cool thing. And this was just the first, modest resolution image. This one flyby took over 1200 images, many much higher quality. Some of them are already down and I have to get back to look at more before I go home to sleep. And sleep I need, because tomorrow, the other data – including the spectral data of MASCS for which I am Instrument Scientist will be ready for first look. Our data are a measly strip across the equator, nothing compared to the glorious images that are now filling our eyes, but the spectra will help tell us the secrets of what Mercury is made of, and how it interacts with the solar blast furnace.
January 13, 2008
MESSENGER – in many ways, the little spacecraft that could – will soon make its first flyby of the innermost planet of our solar system. The science team is poised to convert the downlinked data stream of binary bits into the first close-up images of this puzzling world in almost 33 years. Technological advances made over the last three decades, built into a suite of miniaturized electronic instruments, will yield other types of measurements, many of which could not have been made at the time of Mariner 10.
MESSENGER is so nearly perfectly on course that two backup trajectory-correction maneuvers were not needed, and solar pressure from the looming Sun is helping to ease the probe toward threading its final needle – a point in mathematical and physical space at 200 kilometers (124 miles) above Mercury’s rocky surface. Tomorrow’s flyby – whose primary purpose is to continue to slow the spacecraft for eventual propulsive insertion into orbit about Mercury in March 2011 – will allow unprecedented views of about half of the side of the planet not seen by Mariner 10.
In a week’s time, the entire Caloris basin – an impact structure more than 1,300 kilometers (about 800 miles) in diameter – will have been revealed in all its glory. Many other such impact features on Mercury – signatures of the late heavy bombardment of the inner solar system that produced the Imbrium basin on the Moon and the Hellas basin on Mars, among others – may be imaged at close range for the first time.
The flyby observations and their scientific implications should be spectacular. But in an electronic world of special effects and the global village, connected by cell phones and the Internet, mythical exploration can be confused with the real thing. It should not surprise planetary scientists that a public used to seeing Captain Jean-Luc Picard navigating the Enterprise from the Earth past Saturn in less than 10 seconds on a television trailer might be confused that the actual journey to Mercury is such a long one.
Sci-Fi Channel viewers are more likely to be familiar with Stargate Atlantis than with the likes of Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, Captain Nathaniel Palmer, Captain John Davis, and those who subsequently followed to explore Antarctica. The omnipresence of sophisticated entertainment imparts an ever-increasing need for the technical community to engage their non-technical counterparts not just in education but also simply in continuing conversation.
Driven by the economic bonanza and unfettered national ambitions of the spice trade, the Era of European Exploration yielded widespread new understanding of our planet for the first time. Later explorers sought in vain for northeast and northwest passages, uncovering still more about Earth and its environs. Antarctica had its own heroic age of exploration. Through two world wars, expeditions to these farthest reaches of the Earth were small and privately financed, but the small budgets yielded significant discoveries.
That world changed in 1947 with “Operation Highjump,” the U.S. Naval expedition to Antarctica. New national rivalries fueled explorations of the planet’s last unknown real estate. And then something wonderful happened. A world on the precipice of the Cold War agreed to global scientific cooperation as part of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), which established the framework for the current era of Antarctic exploration founded on the Antarctic Treaty. At the same time, a new U.S. agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), was formed.
Fifty years later, the explorers have changed, and their horizons have broadened. The national political imperatives have changed as well, but exploration and new discoveries continue. The Cold War and the Space Race have taken humanity to the Moon – for a short time, but surely not the last – yet space exploration has also taught us how to work together in a truly international enterprise. Like the signing of the Antarctic Treaty, this cooperation has been no small feat.
Robotic emissaries now in orbit about Saturn, Mars, Venus, and our Moon have been enabled and are now operated by thousands of engineers, scientists, and space agency staffers from several continents and many nations. The twin Voyager spacecraft are nearing the interstellar void, and New Horizons is en route to the first views of Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Everyone on this planet continues by proxy to feel the push of Robert Browning: “Ah, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”
MESSENGER will soon return images and other observations from regions unseen and of phenomena unsuspected. We scientists will scurry to analyze, quantify, and make sense of it all. Journalists will scamper to report the news, and many citizens will turn avidly to their Web browsers to view the latest findings.
Those are the trees. But there is also a forest. This is exploration and discovery in its most real sense, not some electronic-game designer’s newest effort. The exploration paradigm is shifting, and we can and should all take the new path together. Doing so will not be not easy or cheap. And we must balance our finite resources with the need to preserve what we have here on our own planet. Life always presents us with choices and balances. But the message from MESSENGER and our other far-flung emissaries is that exploring the unknown is part of the best in us all.
No need to beam me up, Scotty. There is intelligent life here.
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