NASA orbits Mercury for first time with Messenger probe

By Andrew Couts Published March 18, 2011

messenger-mercury-orbit-nasa — Image used with permission by copyright holder

For the first time in human history, an Earth-made vehicle has successfully entered the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to our sun.

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft entered Mercury’s orbit at about 9:15pm EST on Thursday after a 30-minute rocket blast pushed the unmanned probe into the planet’s gravitational pull, the Los Angeles Times reports. Announcement of Messenger’s orbit entry was met with jubilation from the mission control room at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland.

Recommended Videos

About 40 minutes after confirmation of Messenger’s entry into Mercury’s orbit, mission lead engineer Eric Finnegan declared that the team had pulled off the unprecedented with near-perfect accuracy. “We hit the trajectory to within half a sigma, for my engineer friends in the crowd,” Finnegan tells the LA Times. “It was right on the money.”

Messenger, which originally launched in 2004, will photograph Mercury from its close proximity, and send those images back to NASA for analysis. This will help to better discover the planet’s composition, magnetic fields, atmosphere and other details.

In the 6.5 years the probe has been in space, Messenger — which stands for “MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging” — has traveled a total of about 4.9 billion miles, during which it completed 15 orbits of the sun. It has reached near-record speeds of about 140,000 mph.

While the craft only measures 4.7-feet-tall by 6.1-feet-wide by 4.2-feet-deep, it weighed approximately 2,420 pounds when it launched. About 55 percent of that weight — 1,320 pounds — was fuel. Messenger’s dry weight is only about 1,100 pounds. (For more interesting facts about Messenger, click here.)

Mercury is located about 39 million miles from the sun — about three times closer than Earth, which orbits at about 93 million miles from the center of our solar system.

Watch a brief animated simulation that shows Messenger’s entry into Mercury’s orbit:

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…

Computing

How to change margins in Google Docs

Laptop Working from Home

When you create a document in Google Docs, you may need to adjust the space between the edge of the page and the content --- the margins. For instance, many professors have requirements for the margin sizes you must use for college papers.

You can easily change the left, right, top, and bottom margins in Google Docs and have a few different ways to do it.

Computing

What is Microsoft Teams? How to use the collaboration app

A close-up of someone using Microsoft Teams on a laptop for a videoconference.

Online team collaboration is the new norm as companies spread their workforce across the globe. Gone are the days of primarily relying on group emails, as teams can now work together in real time using an instant chat-style interface, no matter where they are.

Using Microsoft Teams affords video conferencing, real-time discussions, document sharing and editing, and more for companies and corporations. It's one of many collaboration tools designed to bring company workers together in an online space. It’s not designed for communicating with family and friends, but for colleagues and clients.

Computing

Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs

A person using a laptop that displays various Microsoft Office apps.

For the last few decades, Microsoft Word has been the de facto standard for word processors across the working world. That's finally starting to shift, and it looks like one of Google's productivity apps is the heir apparent. The company's Google Docs solution (or to be specific, the integrated word processor) is cross-platform and interoperable, automatically syncs, is easily shareable, and perhaps best of all, is free.

However, using Google Docs proves it still has a long way to go before it can match all of Word's features -- Microsoft has been developing its word processor for over 30 years, after all, and millions still use Microsoft Word. Will Google Docs' low barrier to entry and cross-platform functionality win out? Let's break down each word processor in terms of features and capabilities to help you determine which is best for your needs.
How does each word processing program compare?
To put it lightly, Microsoft Word has an incredible advantage over Google Docs in terms of raw technical capability. From relatively humble beginnings in the 1980s, Microsoft has added new tools and options in each successive version. Most of the essential editing tools are available in Google Docs, but users who are used to Word will find it limited.