Home > Ephemeris Program, Events, Mercury, NASA, Space exploration > 03/17/11 – Ephemeris – MESSENGER spacecraft arrives at Mercury tonight

03/17/11 – Ephemeris – MESSENGER spacecraft arrives at Mercury tonight

March 17, 2011

Ephemeris for St. Patrick’s Day, Thursday, March 17th.  The sun will rise at 7:51.  It’ll be up for 11 hours and 59 minutes, setting at 7:50.   The moon, 2 days before full, will set at 6:48 tomorrow morning.

This evening the MESSENGER Spacecraft will fire its main engine for 15 minutes to put itself in orbit of the planet Mercury.  The rocket firing will be at 8:45 this evening.  Due to light time delays caused by Mercury being 97 million miles away, we won’t know if the rocket fired until 8:54.  While its high gain antenna won’t be pointed at earth, we should get a signal from its omni- directional antenna.  We did get a signal from Cassini with its orbital insertion of Saturn in 2004, and that was nearly a billion miles away.  I don’t know if NASA TV’s covering the insertion live, but Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is having a live webcast.  Google “messenger mercury live orbital insertion” It was the first hit. I’ll have the address on the blog.   http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/mer_orbit.html

* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

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