Image courtesy of NASA The Sun’s closest neighbor, Mercury, now
has a spacecraft zooming around its orbit. NASA’s Messenger
spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury on
Thursday , March 17th, 2011 around 9 p.m. EDT. This is the first
spacecraft to begin orbiting Mercury, a milestone for US space
exploration. Mercury is located in a very hot part of our solar
system, only an average of 58 kilometers from the sun. Because
of this harsh thermal environment, engineers from the Applied
Physics Laboratory began monitoring the spacecraft to make sure
all of its instruments are working on March 23. On April 4th,
2011 MESSENGER will begin collecting scientific data. For More
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