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

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2013 17:40:44 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201312100140.rBA1ei7l026324_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

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.
Received on Mon 09 Dec 2013 08:40:44 PM PST