One hundred days from today, MESSENGER will execute a 15-minute maneuver that will place the spacecraft 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.  It has already been 14 years since this mission was first proposed to NASA, more than 10 years since the project officially began, and over six years since the spacecraft was launched.

A multitude of milestones have been passed on the way toward the primary science phase of the mission, including six planetary flybys and five deep-space maneuvers. The team completed a milestone today of a different sort: an orbital readiness review, held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The review was the culmination of more than one year of major reviews designed to confirm the readiness of all mission elements to achieve orbit about Mercury next March and to begin orbital operations shortly thereafter.

“MESSENGER has been on a long journey,” offers DTM director and MESSENGER Principal Investigator Sean Solomon, “but the promised land lies ahead.  All of the preparations for orbit insertion and orbital operations by the project team and the mission’s many review panels have served to maximize the likelihood that the intensive exploration of the innermost planet will begin smoothly and efficiently 100 days from now.”