Abstract
The first spacecraft to head to Mercury in more than 30 years performed its second successful flyby of Venus on 5 June, providing the first opportunity for testing all of the spacecraft's scientific instruments.NASA's MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft left Earth in August 2004 and is expected to reach Mercury in March 2011. Along the way it has performed flybys of Earth and Venus and will perform three fly‐bys of Mercury before settling into its final orbit. These flybys provide a gravity assist for the spacecraft; the one this month changed the direction of the spacecraft's path and decelerated it from 36.5 to 27.8 kilometers per second.
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