After flying nearly 5 billion miles over six years, the MESSENGER spacecraft is scheduled to begin orbiting the innermost planet. On Thursday, March 17, join Denton Ebel, associate curator in the Museum’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Joe Boesenberg, senior scientific assistant in the department to watch a live feed from MESSENGER operations center at Johns Hopkins University and hear about new information that has been gleaned from the mission so far, such as the importance of understanding the planet’s high-density composition.
To date, three flybys of Mercury have yielded insights into this least explored terrestrial planet, starting with a historic flyby in January 2008. The Museum’s Science Bulletins chronicled the MESSENGER science team’s reaction as the orbiter’s first images of Mercury rolled in. Click below to watch the Science Bulletins video feature. For more about the MESSENGER mission, check out the article, “First Planet Finishes Last.”