Nasa’s Mercury surface, space environment, geochemistry and ranging (Messenger) spacecraft has completed a two-week flight test to ensure its readiness for orbital operations.
The test provides high-fidelity verification of the tools, processes and procedures that are needed to conduct flight operations at Mercury.
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Messenger mission operations manager Andy Calloway said that the goal was to exercise the flight system in conditions as nearly identical to those experienced in Mercury orbit to validate performance and run as many of the same processes to match a typical fortnight of orbital operations.
For the test flight, an orbit-like track schedule was put in place to include daily contacts to play back stored data, upload commands and monitor vehicle health, while pointing the high-gain antenna at the Earth.
The test included a variety of orbit-like scenarios and activities such as eclipse power management, star tracker management, quick data acquisition, variable downlink data-rate changes, command timing biases, weekly ephemeris loads, bi-weekly command loads and instrument memory checks.
During the second half of the test, science instruments conducted a series of observations as if the spacecraft were in orbit around Mercury.
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By GlobalDataThe Messenger craft will enter into orbit around Mercury in March 2011 on a year-long mission to study the planet.
