The MESSENGER Mission: Another “Best of 2011” Title

by Kasey Cunningham

Discover magazine’s “100 Top Science Stories of 2011” ranks the MESSENGER mission to Mercury at number 25.  In “Mercury’s New Face,” an article written by author Dava Sobel for the special January/February issue, MESSENGER is depicted as a challenging mission, one that had not been attempted until DTM’s Sean Solomon and his team made it their goal to explore the “underexplored.”

Sobel had been among the visitors to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on the evening last March that MESSENGER was inserted into orbit about Mercury, and she wrote her story as a first-hand account of that evening. As she and others were awaiting news from the spacecraft, she wrote, “The flybys have gathered so much new data that some say they have already justified the mission’s cost, even if tonight should end in disaster.”

The top two science stories listed by Discover magazine are the finding by high-energy physicists that subatomic particles seem to travel faster than the speed of light and the creation of stem cells to render an immune system resistant to HIV and eventually provide a cure for AIDS. Another “Top Science Story” is “The Bird Watcher” by Peter Vesterbacka, which explains the touch-screen science behind making “Angry Birds” the most addictive computer game in history.

The January/February issue of Discover will be on newsstands until February 6.