* Astronomy

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Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

An image of Mercury captured by the Messenger spaceprobes narrow angle camera on the 27th August, 2009, when it was 672,000 kilometres away from the planet.
Image scale is 17 kilometres/pixel

Astronomers on Earth are about to learn a whole lot more about the planet Mercury as NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft passes less than 229 kilometres above the planets surface on September 29, 2009.

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NASA will host a media teleconference at 17:00 GMT on Wednesday, Sept. 23, to preview the third and final flyby of Mercury by the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging spacecraft known as MESSENGER.
On Sept. 29, the spacecraft will swing less than 142 miles above the planet's rocky surface for a final gravity assist that will enable it to enter orbit around Mercury in March 2011. With more than 90 percent of the planet's surface imaged after the spacecraft's second flyby, the team will focus instruments on questions raised by the earlier flybys to advance our understanding of the planet closest to the sun.

Source NASA

On September 29, the MESSENGER spacecraft will pass by Mercury for the third time, flying 141.7 miles above the planet's rocky surface for a final gravity assist that will enable it to enter orbit about Mercury in 2011. This encounter will also provide new observational opportunities for MESSENGER's Magnetometer, designed to determine the structure and origin of Mercury's intrinsic magnetic field.

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