[meteorite-list] MESSENGER Team Presents Latest Mercury Findings at AGU Fall Meeting

[Ron Baalke]

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php?id=247

MESSENGER Mission News
December 9, 2013

MESSENGER Team Presents Latest Mercury Findings at AGU Fall Meeting

Members of the MESSENGER team will present a broad range of findings from 
the spacecraft's orbital investigation of Mercury during the 2013 Fall 
Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which takes place this 
week, December 9-13, in San Francisco. In 33 oral and poster presentations, 
team scientists will report on the analysis and interpretation of observations 
made by MESSENGER's instruments in the 2.5 years since the spacecraft 
entered orbit around Mercury in March 2011.

The majority of the MESSENGER papers will be given in three special sessions 
on December 9. Those oral and poster presentations will report new findings 
on Mercury's gravity field, surface composition, exosphere, and magnetotail; 
thermal models derived from MESSENGER topography; Mercury's permanently 
shadowed craters; and the planet's substorm cycle.

Many of these presentations will be available by video on demand. For 
more information, visit the AGU Fall Meeting web page 

http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/virtual-options/live-stream-video-demand/ 

and click on the appropriate session at the scheduled time (Pacific time).

On December 10, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. PDT, MESSENGER Project Scientist 
Ralph McNutt will present MESSENGER's preliminary findings from its observations 
of the comets 2P/Encke and C/2012 S1 (ISON) at a press conference, "The 
Battle of Fire and Ice: New Scientific Results from Comet ISON." Additional 
information is available at 

http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/media-center/press-conferences/#ison

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) 
is a NASA-sponsored scientific investigation of the planet Mercury and 
the first space mission designed to orbit the planet closest to the Sun. 
The MESSENGER spacecraft launched on August 3, 2004, and entered orbit 
about Mercury on March 17, 2011 (March 18, 2011 UTC), to begin a yearlong 
study of its target planet. MESSENGER's first extended mission began on 
March 18, 2012, and ended one year later. MESSENGER is now in a second 
extended mission, which is scheduled to conclude in March 2015. Dr. Sean 
C. Solomon, the Director of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth 
Observatory, leads the mission as Principal Investigator. The Johns Hopkins 
University Applied Physics Laboratory built and operates the MESSENGER 
spacecraft and manages this Discovery-class mission for NASA.