MESSENGER:first ever spacecraft to enter Mercury's orbit tonight.

clln

Sadly it will just miss orbit insertion Patricks day Irish time at 00.45 on the 18th.
US is already on summer time until Ireland changes clock on March 27th so + 4 hours to be added to times below

Artist's concept of MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury.
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Follow these simple instructions to explore Mercury in the Google Earth interface. After more than a dozen laps through the inner solar system, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft will move into orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011. The durable spacecraft--carrying seven science instruments and fortified against the blistering environs near the sun--will be the first to orbit the innermost planet.

At 8:45 p.m. EDT, MESSENGER--having pointed its largest thruster very close to the direction of travel--will fire that thruster for nearly 14 minutes, with other thrusters firing for an additional minute, slowing the spacecraft by 862 meters per second (1,929 mph) and consuming 31 percent of the propellant that the spacecraft carried at launch. Less than 9.5 percent of the usable propellant at the start of the mission will remain after completing the orbit insertion maneuver, but the spacecraft will still have plenty of propellant for future orbit correction maneuvers.
The orbit insertion will place the spacecraft into a 12-hour orbit about Mercury with a 200 kilometer (124 mile) minimum altitude. At the time of orbit insertion, MESSENGER will be 46.14 million kilometers (28.67 million miles) from the sun and 155.06 million kilometers (96.35 million miles) from Earth.

MESSENGER has been on a six-year mission to become the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The spacecraft followed a path through the inner solar system, including one flyby of Earth, two flybys of Venus, and three flybys of Mercury. This impressive journey is returning the first new spacecraft data from Mercury since the Mariner 10 mission over 30 years ago.

best of luck to it!:)

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html

clln

A live webcast can be found of this event at link below.
coverage begins at 23.55 GMT March 17th.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/mer_orbit.html

Yayyyyyy!!!!!!

NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury at approximately 9 p.m. EDT Thursday. This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system's innermost planet.
several weeks, APL engineers will be focused on ensuring the spacecraft’s systems are all working well in Mercury’s harsh thermal environment
For the next . Starting on March 23, the instruments will be turned on and checked out, and on April 4 the mission's primary science phase will begin.

bogman

Success, nice one

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12761025

rccaulfield

Thats Brilliant news! Very difficult to get near with the suns gravity-amazing!

clln

First Image Ever Obtained from Mercury Orbit

At 5:20 am EDT on Mar. 29, 2011, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. The MESSENGER team is currently looking over the newly returned data, which are still continuing to come down.

Fullsize image can be downloaded from;

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1907.html