Orbiting Planet Mercury: Engineering Innovations—Guest Editors’ Introduction
Vol. 34, No. 1 (2017)
Orbiting Planet Mercury: Engineering Innovations
This issue of the Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest comes at the end of the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission—which flew the only spacecraft ever to orbit the planet Mercury, the Sun's closest neighbor. This compilation offers a culminating report highlighting the mission's applied innovations in engineering and operations. It is a retrospective on how the integrated system of systems performed and how it was operated in Mercury's hostile environment, managing risk to extend the mission's life to more than four times that required to achieve full mission success.
In This Issue
