[meteorite-list] Mercury Crater-Naming Contest Winners Announced

[Ron Baalke]

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/details.php?id=283

MESSENGER Mission News
April 29, 2015

Mercury Crater-Naming Contest Winners Announced

The MESSENGER Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Team, coordinated through 
the Carnegie Institution for Science, announces the winning names from 
its competition to name five impact craters on Mercury. The contest submissions 
had to be submitted by January 15, 2015, and the International Astronomical 
Union (IAU) -- the governing body of planetary and satellite nomenclature 
since 1919 -- made the selections from a semi-final submission of 17 artists' 
names. The newly selected crater names are Carolan, Enheduanna, Karsh, 
Kulthum, and Rivera.

Under IAU rules, all new craters on Mercury must be named after an artist, 
composer, or writer who was famous for more than 50 years and has been 
dead for more than three years.

* Turlough O'Carolan (Carolan), was an Irish composer during the late 
1600s and early 1700s.

* Enheduanna, an Akkadian princess who lived in the Sumerian city of Ur 
in ancient Mesopotamia (today's Iraq and Kuwait), and is regarded by many 
scholars as possibly the earliest known author and poet.

* Yousuf Karsh, was an Armenian/Canadian and one of the greatest portrait 
photographers of the twentieth century.

* Umm Kulthum, was an Egyptian singer, songwriter, and film actress of 
the 1920s to the 1970s.

* Diego Rivera, was a prominent Mexican painter and muralist from the 
1920s to the 1950s.

NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has been in orbit about Mercury since March 
2011 and is due to finally impact the planet tomorrow. The MESSENGER spacecraft 
has far surpassed expectations in the duration of the mission and in the 
quantity and quality of data returned. The original goal of the craft 
was to take 2,500 images of the planet, but is has returned more than 
250,000. The EPO team organized the crater-naming competition to celebrate 
the mission's achievements.

The winners come from many different countries. Carolan was suggested 
by Fergal Donnelly (Belgium), Joseph Brusseau (USA), and Reane Morrison 
(USA). Enheduanna was submitted by Gagan Toor (India). Karsh was submitted 
by Elizabeth Freeman Rosenzweig (USA). Kulthum was suggested by Malouk 
Ba-Isa (Saudi Arabia), Riana Rakotoarimanan (Switzerland), Yehya Hassouna 
(USA), David Suttles (USA), Thorayya Said Giovanelli (USA), and Matt Giovanelli 
(USA). Rivera was suggested by Ricardo Martinez (Mexico), Rebecca Hare 
(USA), Arturo Gutierrez (Mexico), and Jose Martinez (USA).

Julie Edmonds, the EPO team leader at the Carnegie Institution for Science, 
remarked, "The IAU working group that chose the names was very happy with 
the submissions. In all we had 3,600 contest entries, a resounding success 
for the excitement that the MESSENGER mission to Mercury has generated."

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Final Maneuver Extends MESSENGER Operations by One More Orbit

MESSENGER mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied 
Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., conducted a maneuver on April 
28 designed to raise the spacecraft's minimum altitude sufficiently to 
ensure impact onto Mercury during the desired orbit when full coverage 
by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) scheduled.

The previous maneuver, completed on April 24, raised MESSENGER's minimum 
altitude from 8.3 kilometers (5.2 miles) to 18.2 kilometers (11.3 miles) 
above the planet's surface. Because of progressive changes to the orbit 
over time, however, the spacecraft's minimum altitude continued to decrease.

At the time of this most recent maneuver, MESSENGER was in an orbit with 
a closest approach of 5.3 kilometers (3.3 miles) above the surface of 
Mercury. With a velocity change of 0.45 meters per second (1 mile per 
hour), the spacecraft's four largest monopropellant thrusters released 
gaseous helium pressurant to nudge the spacecraft to an orbit with a closest 
approach altitude of 6.3 kilometers (3.9 miles).

This maneuver also increased the spacecraft's speed relative to Mercury 
near the maximum distance from Mercury, adding about 3.5 seconds to the 
spacecraft's eight-hour, 21.2-minute orbit period. The final maneuver 
in the MESSENGER low-altitude hover campaign, this was the mission's fourth 
course-correction maneuver to use the helium gas pressurant as a propellant 
to change the spacecraft's orbit. This view shows MESSENGER's orientation 
at the start of the maneuver.

MESSENGER was 155.2 million kilometers (96.5 million miles) from Earth 
when the 3.02-minute maneuver began at about 5:20 p.m. EDT. Mission controllers 
at APL verified the start of the maneuver 8.6 minutes later, after the 
first signals indicating spacecraft thruster activity reached NASA's DSN 
tracking station in Goldstone, California.

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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 was launched on August 3, 2004, and entered orbit 
about Mercury on March 18, 2011, 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 operate through April 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.