News Releases

NASA will release the first orbital image of Mercury's surface, including previously unseen terrain, on Tuesday afternoon, March 29.

John Sommerer, head of the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has been named one of the inaugural Gilman Scholars by university President Ronald J. Daniels and Provost Lloyd B. Minor.

Data from its first three days in orbit about Mercury have confirmed the initial assessment of the spacecraft team that MESSENGER is in its intended orbit and operating nominally.

At 9:10 p.m. EDT, engieers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., received the anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around the planet Mercury.

As spring continues to unfold at Saturn, April showers on the planet’s largest moon, Titan, have brought methane rain to its equatorial deserts, as revealed in images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This is the first time scientists have obtained current evidence of rain soaking Titan’s surface at low latitudes.

MESSENGER is now on autopilot, faithfully executing a detailed set of instructions required to achieve its historic rendezvous with Mercury tomorrow night.

After more than a dozen laps through the inner solar system and six planetary flybys, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft will move into orbit around Mercury on at around 9 p.m. EDT on March 17, 2011. The durable spacecraft — carrying seven science instruments and fortified against the blistering environs near the Sun — will be the first to orbit the innermost planet.

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, March 15, to discuss the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.

Rocks on Mars dug from far underground by crater-blasting impacts are providing glimpses of one possible way Mars’ atmosphere has become much less dense than it used to be.

Ten days from now – on March 17 EDT – the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute maneuver that will place it into orbit about Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and initiating a one-year science campaign to understand the innermost planet.