ROBERT STROM: The Mariner 10 mission was a flyby of Mercury.
And it made three flybys.
This was in 1974, '75.
And it imaged about 45% of the planet.
So there's 55% that we have never
seen before at all, nothing.
And that mission was, in fact, reconnaissance
in preparation for a follow on orbiter, which never happened,
until now.
SPEAKER 1: 2, 1, and 0, and liftoff
of Messenger on NASA's mission to Mercury,
a planetary enigma in our solar system.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ROBERT STROM: I've waited 33.7 years for this day.
Yes, I'm very excited.
LOUISE PROCKTER: Today is the day we finally fly by Mercury,
after several years of waiting.
So we're getting very excited.
I think, in about an hour, we actually fly
about 200 kilometers from the surface of Mercury,
if all goes well.
SPEAKER 2: We'll commencing at 19:02.
SPEAKER 3: This spaceship is actually behind the planet.
And we're just waiting to see that signal drop.
SPEAKER 2: And again, a reminder, closest approach
is 19:04:39.
LOUISE PROCKTER: Space exploration
is a very risky business.
Certainly, flying by Mercury is risky.
We're 11 times closer to the sun then at the Earth.
There are so many things that can go wrong.
And yet, so many things go right.
SPEAKER 2: Messenger Ops, the applause says it all.
Radio Science does see the expected one-way signal.
SPEAKER 3: Why are we flying a mission to Mercury?
The process of exploring our Solar System
is one where we're ultimately trying
to learn how the Earth and the other planets came to be.
And every time we've visited one of our sister planets,
we've learned how diverse the outcome of planet formation
and planet evolution has been.
And so simply to complete the inventory of what
has been the outcome of planet formation processes
in the Solar System, there has been
a need, ever since Mariner 10, to send a spacecraft to Mercury
that would take this global view of the planet.
ROBERT STROM: This is the thing.
When you look at Mercury with the untrained eye,
people say, well, it's just like the moon.
We've been to the moon many times.
We know all about it.
So it's not interesting and Mercury's not interesting.
That couldn't be farther from the truth.
LOUISE PROCKTER: Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.
It's a terrestrial planet, just like the Earth,
and Mars, and Venus.
But it's a planet of extremes.
It's very, very hot at the surface.
It's 11 times hotter than the Earth.
It's one of the smallest planets.
It's only slightly larger than our own moon.
It has a very large core, an unusually large core.
It's about 75% of the radius of the planet, which
is much larger than any of the other terrestrial planets,
which no one can explain at this time.
SPEAKER 4: So basically, we'll have the geological maps
and the projection here with all the sequence charts.
So go to this chart for the details.
LOUISE PROCKTER: Everyone is sitting patiently
or impatiently waiting for the data to come down.
We're just checking that all our systems are ready,
that we're talking to the Mission Operations Center
so that, as soon as those images hit the ground,
we will get them into our software.
We can process them, and calibrate them, and then
start to look at them, and start to interpret them.
[? ERIK HIGGINS: ?] [? Erik Higgins. ?]
LOUISE PROCKTER: Hey [? Erik, ?] this is Louise.
The suspense is killing me.
[? ERIK HIGGINS: ?] I know, it's killing us, too.
LOUISE PROCKTER: Is it really?
[? ERIK HIGGINS: ?] We're watching the transactions
go back and forth.
It's just taking a while.
LOUISE PROCKTER: OK, we'll just try and be patient then.
ERIK HIGGINS: Yeah, I know.
I don't know what to do.
We're eating brie and crackers over here.
I don't know what you're doing.
SPEAKER 5: I don't know what's going to happen.
It's not going to get deleted.
It won't get deleted until they have confirmation
that it's on the ground.
So from that perspective, we're confident.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 6: Breathe, Ed.
LOUISE PROCKTER: No pressure.
You know you can do it.
SPEAKER 5: On the screen here is your project software.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There it is.
LOUISE PROCKTER: Oh my God, where's Bob Strom We've
got to gt Bob in here.
SPEAKER 5: Is that spectacular?
Look at this puppy right here, Bob.
LOUISE PROCKTER: See it?
ROBERT STROM: Oh, there they are.
Whoa!
It looks like [INAUDIBLE],, right?
SPEAKER 6: That's amazing, yeah.
ROBERT STROM: It's very emotional for me, really.
I've waited a long time for this.
And I'm sorry.
I'm getting emotional.
But it's such a long way.
And then, boom, there it is.
SPEAKER 5: You know, I'm not a crater kind of guy.
But it looks just a little less cratered on the right.
ROBERT STROM: Yeah.
LOUISE PROCKTER: So later this afternoon, we're
having a meeting of the whole science team.
And we're going to get together.
And at this point, people have had a few hours
to start looking at the images and really
taking a close look at them.
SPEAKER 6: It's excavated something really bright.
LOUISE PROCKTER: So we're expecting
that people are going to start pointing out some things
that they've learned already from the data
and some new things they might have discovered that we
wouldn't have seen before.
SPEAKER 7: OK, first of all, the most important thing we can say
is actually the whole team for some fantastic images.
[APPLAUSE]
It's beautiful.
LOUISE PROCKTER: From this flyby,
we're particularly interested in studying
the history of Mercury.
SPEAKER 7: We're seeing a lot of really exciting things
and the images.
We have these planes, which are deformed out here,
which we can get ages on.
We have this crater, which impacts into those,
which we can get an age on.
And we have these interior plants,
which are further deformed, which
we can get an age on as well.
So the chronology really ought to be--
and this is one example.
LOUISE PROCKTER: We will be able to look
at the features on the surface and see which ones overlap
other features and try and put together a time history of how
did Mercury form and evolve.
It's a bit like being a detective.
We have the crime scene.
And we have to work out what happened.
Well, though we've just had a very exciting flyby,
our work has only just begun.
SPEAKER 8: In a few minutes, looking ahead
to the Mercury II flyby.
LOUISE PROCKTER: This is the first
of three flybys of Mercury.
And that should have given the spacecraft just
the right amount of push it needs
to get into orbit around Mercury in 2011.
At that point, we will orbit the planet for one
Earth year, imaging the whole surface in 11 colors.
And we'll be taking data with the other seven instruments
on the spacecraft.
ROBERT STROM: Every time we go to a new place,
every time we discover planets around other stars,
there's a greater diversity of phenomena, and landscape,
and processes than we've appreciated before.
So on that basis, we expect to be surprised.