Messenger 10 year Anniversary

One of the first posts I made on this blog was about the Messenger probe to Mercury - at the time it had just made the 3rd fly-by before orbit insertion about 18 months later. On 1st August it celebrated 10 years since its launch.

So a large beer to all involved!

So now we have Messenger at Mercury, Venus Express performing dangerous aerobraking manoeuvres in Venus' atmosphere, a fleet robots trundling over Mars - not forgetting a small fleet of satellites around the planet, Juno on its way to Jupiter and venerable Cassini still going strong around Saturn.

Then there are the three that I'm most anticipating:

• Dawn's arrival at Ceres in February 2015
• New Horizons arrival, or rather fly-by, of Pluto in July 2015

and then in just a few days, Rosetta finally arrives at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk after 10 years. At this moment she's 3 days away with about 500 km to go! She's caring a lander called Philae which'll deeply later this year. ESA have a good track record of this kind of landings in exotic places with Huygens.

Can't wait!

In the meantime:

False colour image of Mercury showing mineral distribution.