Last week, just past midnight after St. Patrick’s Day, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully slipped into an orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet. This was a difficult maneuver against the pull of the sun, and the groups of science teams around the country who have worked on the Mercury MESSENGER project for seven years were elated, to say the least.
Among these scientists are two Augsburg physics graduates — Brian Anderson ’82 and George Ho ’91. Both work at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), which serves as the manager of the Mercury MESSENGER project for NASA. Continue reading “Two Auggies on the Mercury MESSENGER team”
On Jan. 14, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft made its first flyby of the planet Mercury — the first by any Earth craft in over 30 years. Behind the scenes of this long-awaited return to Mercury, there was an Augsburg connection: Distinguished Alumnus Brian Anderson ’82 is the mission’s Magnetometer Instrument Scientist. One of the main goals of the Messenger mission is to understand the nature of that dense planet’s magnetic field.